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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for that, and I look forward with great anticipation to hearing what he has to say about it at Third Reading. The main point that I was trying to make is that, although all those good things in the Bill address pupil behaviour, the ethos, atmosphere and culture of respect and tolerance in a school do not just relate to how the pupils behave; they relate to how the teachers and the caretaker behave, too. If the caretaker refers disrespectfully to some children in the school using some of the very nasty homophobic language that you sometimes hear, that affects the children just as much as if other children made the comments, or if the teachers did. Unfortunately, it does happen that some teachers make these comments. Teachers also sometimes feel that they are being bullied by other members of staff for their sexual orientation or for some other aspect of their personality. Our amendment tries to include the whole school community in the duty to ensure that the pupils have their well-being cared for. The behaviour policy is probably well catered for in the Bill as it refers to the pupils, but it does not refer to the whole school. The school is more than the pupils; it has staff, volunteers and all kinds of people who come into a school. It is important that the policy should take all that into account, so that you have that mutual respect between adults and children, between adults and adults, and between children and children. That would be covered by our amendment, and it is not covered in the Bill at the moment.