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Education and Skills Bill

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, for moving the amendment and apologise to the Committee for unavoidably arriving only towards the closing remarks of her introduction. I therefore heard my noble friend Lord Lucas on the subject of hugging. He put his finger on an extraordinarily important feature of current society. Unfortunately, it is not just that children are being taught that hugging is not to be expected; adults outside the school are being taught that hugging is not to be done. These days, physical contact with a child can so easily result in a legal response. That is not the subject of the amendment, so I will not go on about it, except to say how very important I think that it is. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, mentioned cross-curricular subjects. I have a deep suspicion of any claim that a subject is taught as a cross-curricular subject, resulting—unless things have changed very much—from the day on which I embarked as a lecturer at a college of education. I was giving what I thought was rather a good and interesting series of lectures on the French Revolution. At the beginning of the series, I had the close—indeed, amused—attention of my students, which I found very gratifying. Suddenly, the following week, I found it impossible to reach them. They had something else on their mind. Eventually, I said, ““Look, chaps, you are not with me. What are you worrying about?””. They said, ““We have our first practical teaching in school””. I said, ““It is not too difficult. You know your subject very well—a great deal better than the children do. All you have to do is keep order and keep them interested””. They still looked worried, and it was not about their knowledge of their subject; it was about their ability to keep order. I said, ““Surely you have been taught how to keep order in the classroom; you have had discussions about that with people in the education department, and so on””. They said, ““No, no””. So I abandoned the French Revolution and gave what my students, I regret to say, thought were my most valuable three periods on how to keep order in the classroom. When my noble friend Lord Baker was Secretary of State for Education and Science, he appointed me to conduct an inquiry into discipline in schools. Naturally, we inquired of all the teacher training colleges whether they taught keeping good order or discipline. With no exception, they said ““Oh yes, we do””. I did not believe them, so we sent a questionnaire to every student taught in training colleges for the past, I forget exactly how many, years and discovered that only one of them actually taught it; all the others said, ““Oh, it is a cross-curricular subject””. It is very important that parenting is not treated in the same way. The question then arises whether it should be a subject at all. I return, I am afraid, to my constant theme in these debates: the aspect that touches on criminality. An awful lot of children are launched into society with no idea at all of how to relate to other people. They have been brought up by teenage parents who were themselves the children of teenage parents and who do not have the skill to transmit to the children. I have no magic solution to parenting, and I am not at all sure how it should be taught, but it will be vital to our society in the coming years because the phenomenon is increasing. Once that golden chain of knowledge from parent to child to parent to child is broken, no amount of good will or kindness will put it back. It must be organised consciously by the people who are responsible for bringing the child into society. My simple request to the Minister is therefore for an exposition of how his department, or departments collectively across government, propose to tackle this problem. If they do not tackle it, it will overtake us.