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Children, Schools and Families Bill

Yes, but if you do it in that way you fossilise a concept of PSHE in legislation which is 20 years out of date. New Section 85B(1), to be inserted in the Education Act 2002 under Clause 11(4), provides a list of things that should be the result of good education and not elements of it. It will merely become a collection of targets and imperatives which will be delivered without any underlying concept. Much good and really advanced work is going on in schools, which I celebrate whenever I see it. But it is not tick-box stuff as set out here. There are other ways of providing incentives to schools. It can be done through inspection. There are all sorts of ways in which schools can be motivated to take this matter seriously and do it well. The noble Baroness was extremely unfair to say that this is something that was taken away. It was never given. There was no way in which this part of the Bill was going to get through without proper discussion and the Government never provided time for that. This part of the Bill was never on serious offer. It was there as a phantom and no more. As to the right of withdrawal, a tiny proportion, a fraction of a per cent, of children are withdrawn from sex and relationship education. There are no data to suggest that those children have a worse outcome in terms of childhood pregnancies and other things than children who are not withdrawn from such education. If the Government wish to discourage this, they first should do some research to demonstrate that it does harm.