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Education and Skills Bill

I am not convinced of such a provision being almost an examined subject in schools. I see it as much more of an entitlement. It is extremely important that children should be offered exposure to this area, and schools are generally pretty bad at it. Schools do not offer children much education on how to manage money, on how to get on with relationships of various sorts or on sexual health, other than that set out at the moment in some rather unimaginative structures. Anthony Seldon at Wellington College is, as ever, showing the way to make this area of education exciting, engaging and likely to have an impact on children. He is showing that it needs to be part of the whole school life. If we want these sorts of things to work, we need to look at the way the whole school is working. It should be within Ofsted’s remit to look at the way a school works to bring up its children to become proper citizens. The sort of thing that matters to me in this area is the extraordinary rules that are now being promulgated in teacher training that teachers are not allowed to touch children: children who cut themselves in the playground are to be given a plaster to put on themselves; a teacher may not put the plaster on them. I have checked that with teacher training institutions: that is the advice currently being given to young teachers. Under no circumstances should they touch a child. To bring up children with the idea that that is the proper relationship between adults and children is deeply damaging to children, but that is not a curriculum subject and it is not set out in some way in the curriculum; it is the way that schools are managing themselves these days. That is the area where we have most effect on children in terms of many of the subjects that are covered by PHSE. It should be a whole school thing. It should be within the spirit of the school and the way that it conducts itself; otherwise, we start taking bits of learning into little discrete corners by themselves, turning them into things that are taught by rote in the classroom and risking the inevitable: children do not absorb them or take them on board. There are some kinds of learning that are not taken on board in that way; they are taken on board because it is the philosophy of life promoted by their peers and the school. It permeates the whole school environment. Although I support what the noble Baroness said about the aim of this amendment, we have to careful about how we achieve it and how other things we are doing in a school undermine these objectives by creating—to go back to the ban on hugging, which I find extraordinary—a class of children who think that physical involvement with each other is anathema and dangerous. Inculcating that sort of idea has far more lasting effects than anything ever said in PHSE class.