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Children, Schools and Families Bill

I have one brief thought to add to the powerful, and surely incontrovertible, arguments of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—she was absolutely right to make the case as fully as she did—and to the impassioned speeches made by my noble friends Lady Massey and Lady Gould. With the global AIDS pandemic, in a world in which criminal drug trafficking is ubiquitous, and in a society such as ours that has a horrifying and mounting problem of alcoholism, this is not just a matter of safety—the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, understated the issue, if anything; it can be matter of life and death. Young people should have the opportunity of really well considered and really well delivered PSHE. I should say to the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, that while it is true that some schools teach excellently in this field, we know that this education is all too patchy and inadequately delivered and that it needs to be greatly improved. The curriculum needs to be properly designed, training needs to be of an evenly high standard, and the opportunities that young people should have to experience first-rate PSHE ought to be universalised. This matter should not be determined simply in families. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, was absolutely right to make the case that parents should not have the right to opt their children out of this, because young people have responsibilities to other young people, and young people should be entitled to be protected from the hazards in contemporary society. For all these reasons, it is utterly lamentable that these provisions should be lost from the Bill. What the Conservative Party has done in forcing us to this point is a major scandal.