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Children, Schools and Families Bill

My Lords, I strongly welcome the Bill, especially the clauses which make personal, social and health education compulsory subjects in the national curriculum. I should like to talk about that. I had the good fortune to be a member of the Good Childhood Inquiry, and we were one of the many organisations that recommended what is now included in the Bill. In her opening remarks, the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, said nothing much about her party's attitude to this key issue. I will make clear why it is so important that this goes into law. Of course, it is not an original idea: the ancient Romans believed in a healthy mind in a healthy body. However, it is more important now than ever. For example, there have been four comparable surveys of 15 year-olds in Britain. These national samples show that the number of youngsters who suffer from emotional problems is now twice as high as it was in the 1970s. The same is true of the number suffering from behavioural problems. To reverse these trends we need a major rethink of the purpose of education so as to make it as much about the development of character as about competence. That means many things. It means major changes in the ethos of many of our schools, especially our secondary schools, so that mutual respect becomes the central feature of all relationships in school. However, that cannot be legislated for. What can be legislated for is that a specific part of the week be devoted to the development of the life skills laid down in the national curriculum for PSHE. These include understanding and managing your emotions, understanding other people and learning to help them wherever possible, understanding the dangers of unhealthy living, understanding the implications of sex and the obligation to care for a sexual partner, and so on. It is often said that it is the job of parents and not schools to handle these issues. That might work if parents did a good job. However, I should like noble Lords to consider the following facts about sexual relationships in Britain and the Netherlands, where sex education begins in primary schools. In Britain, there are five times as many teenage births. Among young adolescent boys in Britain, only 14 per cent of those who had had sexual experience said that their main reason was that they felt love and commitment. This compares with 56 per cent of young adolescent boys in Holland. Not surprisingly, in Britain only 50 per cent of the couples used contraception, compared with 85 per cent in the Netherlands. These figures speak for themselves and totally justify the approach of the Bill to sexual relationships. Indeed, I would go further and support the clearer position on SRE that was requested earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone. Much more important than that is moral education, more widely considered. No society has ever flourished where the moral education of young people was left exclusively to the parents or family, without other adults being involved. When I spoke on these matters at a conference only a couple of years ago, a questioner came up to me afterwards and said, "Are you saying that schools should provide moral education? Do you not realise that you are not allowed to say that?" Well, I was saying that, and I hope that that will be an important result of the Bill. A crucial issue must be considered: how these things can be taught. They are not easy to teach, especially in secondary schools. They must be taught by teachers in the school and not by outsiders brought in without teachers being involved. They must also be taught by teachers who are qualified to teach them. Starting with primary schools, all teacher training should include a basic minimum of life skills training. In primary schools, every teacher will have to include this in their basic class teaching. We are already seeing very good results from the teaching of social and emotional aspects of learning, under the SEAL programme introduced by the Government a few years ago. However, at secondary level the topics become much more difficult—as do the students. There is a requirement for much more specificity and authoritative detail in these topics, as there is in every subject. I taught history in a secondary school. That was a specialist subject. Teaching life skills should also be a specialist subject in secondary schools: it should not be taught by whoever has a gap in their timetable. It should not be contracted out, as has been suggested in some quarters, to voluntary organisations. It has to be taught by people who are recognised as authoritative by the students and the school. Furthermore, what we actually have to have in secondary schools is the teaching of life skills as a specialist subject taken within the postgraduate certificate in education—not necessarily by everyone teaching life skills, but there must be a core body of specialists teaching this subject in the school and helping the other teachers to do so. Teaching of life skills, as of every other subject, should be evidence based; and there are evidence-based ways of teaching these very difficult subjects. There are programmes that have been developed in many countries where we know, from studying the outcomes by randomised controlled trials, how these programmes actually affect children. We do not always know that in the way we teach French but we could know it in the way we teach life skills; and we ought to be using evidence-based programmes—I happen to know one very well, the Penn Resiliency Program, which is now being taught in 22 schools in Britain. There are enough to make us feel confident that we could teach this subject properly. We ought not to be making it compulsory unless we are confident that we could teach it properly. That has always been the best argument against making it compulsory. We need to proceed rapidly to develop the expertise and to get together the knowledge worldwide that exists of how to teach the subject. It is because I think that that is possible that I support the clause. I have spoken at length on this because it is so important, and because I worry about what the Conservative Party’s attitude to PSHE really is. We are in a pre-election period, and the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, in her opening manifesto—if I may call it that—said nothing much on this point. It would be extremely helpful if, when he comes to wind up, her colleague could tell us where they stand on this.