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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I shall first deal with Amendment No. 92, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, which would make personal and social skills a foundation subject at key stage 4. While we agree that personal and social skills can and should be developed across the school curriculum, they are usually taught discretely through personal, social and health education. We are discussing that issue under Amendments Nos. 91A and 91B. I hope, therefore, that the noble Lord will allow me to address my remarks to PSHE, as I see the two amendments as being in competition with each other in that sense. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and my noble friends said, we have had a non-statutory framework for PSHE in place since 2000. We believe that the right course is to strengthen the teaching of PSHE and not to create a new statutory subject. On the strengthening of PSHE, we absolutely share the commitment set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and my noble friends. The issue is not whether we should strengthen PSHE significantly, because we are doing that—and I shall set out in a moment how we are. I take it for granted that we should strengthen the subject and I simply echo all the remarks that have been made about its importance. The issue under the amendments is, rather, whether at this stage it would be desirable to make it a statutory subject—or, perhaps I should say, a more statutory subject than it is at the moment because, as I said in my remarks in Committee, many aspects of PSHE are already statutory elements of the curriculum, including sex and drugs education. There are also statutory provisions relating to careers guidance and a number of statutory requirements on schools that support PSHE, such as the need for policies on bullying, promoting race equality and child protection. To make PSHE statutory would be a complicated business of unpicking existing statutory provisions to replace them with a new one. But there is another aspect—and I shall be frank on this matter. Later we shall discuss making science in a different way statutory and compulsory. We have had debates about modern languages in that regard. This is not the only subject about which there is an intense debate on making it statutory and compulsory; it applies to many other subjects. If we were to take this step, I am sure that we would face an equivalent argument that we should follow exactly the same course in respect of a number of other subjects. That would get us into a further set of very prescriptive requirements on schools from the centre of a kind which in other contexts noble Lords have argued against throughout our debates on the Bill. We need to balance the steps that it is right to take to improve the take-up of PSHE in schools with the specific issue of whether at this stage it is right to make it a further statutory requirement on schools. In respect of what we are doing to promote PSHE—