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Children, Schools and Families Bill

My Lords, I welcome the Bill and thank the Minister for her introduction. I apologise for not being able to be present for the first couple of minutes; I was not quick enough to reach the Chamber. I also thank the Government for their significant investment in teaching over several years, and I welcome the Government’s raising of the status of teaching and increasing teachers’ salaries, which is crucial. Indeed, one of the themes of this debate has been that the professionals who educate our children and the social workers who work with our children make the biggest difference to children’s success in life. I am very grateful for the work that Moira Gibb and the Social Work Taskforce have done for social workers, but I have one slight comment to make, which I hope will be borne in mind for the future. I know that it has been a priority for the Government to address the needs of the workforce, but my sense has been that too many other priorities have sometimes occluded the need to focus on teachers, social workers, health visitors, staff in residential childcare and in other related professions. The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, spoke of the Conservative commitment to raising the bar in respect of teacher recruitment into courses. I very warmly welcome that. Speaking with two deputy heads of primary schools last week, I found it was exactly what they desired. Another primary school head teacher recently told me that she regretted that, in her own and her staff’s limited experience, the quality of candidates in the past five years or so seemed to be declining in terms of numeracy and literacy. So I do welcome what the noble Baroness proposes. I should like to speak about personal, social, health and economic education within the Bill. As we might not have a Committee stage, I should like to focus on this area and try to go into a little depth on it. I should like to emphasis three main points. One is the need to prioritise the training of PSHE teachers, because there are so many competing interests in teacher training. Making this a statutory responsibility will help to do that. Secondly, it will reduce the levels of teenage pregnancy, and that is very important. Flowing from that, there is a particular concern that I know many of your Lordships have: the number of black and working class white boys growing up without fathers in difficult circumstances. I hope that this introduction of better sex and relationship education early in children’s lives will help them to make better choices of partners. This will result in more children experiencing the presence of their fathers in their up-bringing. The quality of the training of teachers has shrunk over many years. When the Minister’s parents trained as teachers, they may have had three or four years’ training for a Bachelor of Education degree in teaching. But that has gradually declined, and a one-year post-graduate certificate in education has become much more important. There has long been a concern that one year is not enough time to equip teachers with what they need when they enter the school gate. I remember Professor Sir Michael Rutter referring to this when he spoke about child development some time ago at the British Psychological Society. More recently, for the best possible reasons, more teachers are being trained on the job, so they are not necessarily having access even to the education that is provided in colleges. So we have teachers who might be better at their specialist subject, and there are more of them, which is very welcome. But they are not getting the pedagogical understanding that they need to teach well in all subject areas. I will develop that a little further. I spoke to a teacher who trained in Hungary, who spent several months observing one child, making careful notes of that child’s development, and speaking about what she observed with her tutor and her peers. I am not aware of that happening in this country. In Finland, where they have the highest performance in the PISA tables, I understand that the teachers have a five-year qualification. Roughly the last two years are spent either in a range of placements in various schools, so they have a wide experience of what schools are doing, or in pedagogical development and understanding the philosophy of education and child development. I do feel it is important to prioritise PSHE within this very confined space that teachers have to learn in during their initial training. It is crucial to have good quality PSHE. Teachers must be equipped to teach this difficult subject to children. I am also wondering where the Master’s qualification in teaching is now going. I should be grateful for any information that could be provided about the future of this proposal, which is very welcome in principle, that teaching should be a Master’s qualification. In Holland particularly, good quality sex and relationship education appears to have brought down teenage pregnancy rates and kept them down. In the United States, it has taken some time for there to be some demonstrable impact, but a 2008 article by Mueller et al says: ""Our analyses suggest that sex education before first sex helps protect youth from risky sexual behaviors. For population groups that are often considered the most disadvantaged (i.e. urban, African American females), sex education seems to be the most beneficial. Researchers have recently documented the contribution of delayed sexual initiation and improved contraceptive use to the decreased teen pregnancy rate … findings from our analysis suggest that sex education received before first sex by youth in formal settings may contribute to this positive outcome. Sex education should continue to be implemented in schools, community centers and churches and, to be most effective, should occur before youth engage in sexual intercourse for the first time. Sex education provides youth with the knowledge and skills to make healthy and informed decisions about sex, and this study indicates that sex education is making a difference in the sexual behaviors of American youth"." The UK still has the highest level of teenage pregnancy among its neighbours. There has been a welcome reversal in the upward trend, but we are still performing poorly. We should remember what that means. It means that girls and young women are not completing their education, are often not entering employment, are dependent on the state and do not pay taxes. Those are just the most obvious implications of the high teenage pregnancy rate, but of course the children often suffer as well. I apologise for taking so long at this time of night. My third point is that I hope that this policy will enable more fathers to keep in touch with their children. If children receive sex and relationship education early so that they learn how to make better choices in their life partners, to think about their emotions and are able to speak about their decisions openly in school with their classmates and teacher, I hope that they will begin to form more committed relationships. As a result more children would have the pleasure of knowing their fathers. Many noble Lords will know of black and white working class men who do not have the opportunity of knowing their fathers, and it is distressing to see their unhappiness about the experience. They often perform poorly and may well live in poverty. Many of them recognise that their mother has to work twice as hard as she might otherwise have to since she is living without a partner. To conclude, I hope that your Lordships will feel able to befriend this part of the Bill, although I know that it may not have a Committee stage. It could make a significant contribution to breaking the cycle of deprivation that we are so familiar with. It will ensure that teachers are better equipped to teach sex and relationships education. It will reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy and will have beneficial outcomes for children, including more boys having ongoing contact with their fathers.