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I open my remarks by briefly stating my position. It is a great pity that this has become a sort of battle. Whether PSHE should become compulsory is not a yes or no question. It tremendously depends on what is to be taught and who is going to teach it. We need to know not only what the government guidelines say but what is going to be taught. If I had been a pupil of the

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noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in one of her classes, I am sure that I would be much better informed even than I am today-and I should have enjoyed it. However, it is important to know that there are enough teachers available before we start making something compulsory. Otherwise, Bloggs, the geography teacher, who is not much good, will be put on to do PSHE, partly because it is a difficult and tiresome thing to teach. That would be absolutely disastrous.

I was told only the other day that, contrary to what the noble Baroness said, recent research shows that the sort of diet of sex and condoms delivered to 14 to 16 year-olds in most schools today makes absolutely no difference at all to the number of teenage pregnancies among the group. Unless and until there is satisfactory and independent evidence that it does make a difference, there is a strong argument for considering whether we cannot improve what schools are delivering.

I am assured by a number of experts, including representatives of Ofsted, that an increasing body of evidence shows that what makes a difference is the whole-school ethos to which the child is exposed. When families are willing and able to provide supportive parenting to their child, it seems axiomatic that parents should be consulted and involved as partners, particularly in any programme of sexual relationship education. I expect that that would be the case in a great many of the academies that we are talking about today. However, when home life is chaotic, the schools step in and make up for what the family cannot give.

Whether it is learnt at home or in school, it appears that what makes a difference is learning in a secure environment where each child is valued and respected and each child is safe and loved. It is learning that the way in which you treat others matters and that you, too, can be a success in spite of a disadvantaged background. Ofsted reports show that those schools where teaching and a whole-school ethos consistently encompass those values are those that it finds to be outstanding on academic results and child well-being. Some of them are working in very disadvantaged areas.

There are two extremely good reports on 20 primary schools and, I think, 12 outstanding secondary schools working in disadvantaged areas. Perhaps I might briefly quote extracts from those Ofsted reports. First, the report on 20 outstanding primary schools says, among a great many other things:

"It is no longer acceptable to use a child's background as an excuse for underachievement. The challenge for schools is to make a difference ... Viewed in these terms, the job of the school may be construed as providing, through education and care for children's well-being, advantage where it is lacking, mentoring and support for parenting where it is needed, and complementary provision in a school community of high ideals and aspirations ... Primary schools, together with",

other school providers,

"of education and care, are in a pre-eminent position when it comes to having a lasting impact",

on a child's future. Secondly, its report on the secondary schools says:

"The outstanding schools in the sample succeed for the following reasons. They excel at what they do, not just occasionally but for a high proportion of the time. They prove constantly that disadvantage

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need not be a barrier to achievement ... They have strong values and high expectations that are applied consistently and never relaxed".

A prerequisite for respect for others is respect for self. For children from disadvantaged and chaotic families, that may not easily be learnt at home. Excellent schools can build self-esteem and emotional intelligence right across the school in an age-appropriate way. That involves a high level of staff commitment and strong leadership. Schools that generate empathy, self-confidence and aspiration of this kind lead to fewer early pregnancies, but that is not the whole story. They also prepare young people-again, age by age and in an age-appropriate way-for the responsibilities of adult life and parenthood and so could help to break the cycle of disadvantage passed on from generation to generation in some families today.

What are the Government's plans for PSHE and SRE? I hope that they will reject or substantially revise the guidelines produced earlier this year by the previous Government, which concentrate mainly on contraception and largely ignore the role of cementing relationships and creating a stable family. The guidelines make no more than passing reference to the importance of supportive parenting, of a whole-school ethos or of respect for others and for self. I also hope that the Government will delay making SRE compulsory until they are satisfied that there are enough well trained teachers available to deliver this sensitive coverage.

Finally, I hope that the Government will focus their resources on encouraging more schools to develop and deliver whole-school policies that support the emotional and social development of all their pupils, including the less academically able. In this context, I very much hope that the academies that we are talking about today will, in particular, be free to adopt innovative policies-including a wide range of syllabus activities that will provide opportunities for all pupils to experience success-and facilities that include, where appropriate, boarding facilities. I hope that they will try to develop a whole-school ethos which is positive and supportive and which develops emotional intelligence and respect-both self-respect and respect for others. Can the Minister give me any comfort on those issues?

5 pm

Baroness Gould of Potternewton: My Lords, I support this amendment, to which I have added my name, following the great disappointment-the sobbing to which my noble friend Lady Massey referred-of PSHE being removed from the Children, Schools and Families Bill in the wash-up on 7 April. I do so to hear whether the Government are prepared to reconsider their previous negative approach to this issue.

In the wash-up debate, the support for the removal of the clauses from the Bill focused on two main points. First, there was the lack of trained teachers, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. Secondly, there was the view about whether PSHE was being well taught. It certainly was in some schools but, as Ofsted said, that was in too few schools and throughout the country teaching was extremely patchy. Using the shortage of teachers as a reason for not teaching PSHE is standing the argument on its head. The PSHE continuing professional development programme,

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which was established by my noble friend Lord Adonis, has gone some way towards providing a pool of trained teachers. I accept that more has to be done, just as I accept that PSHE should be taught by accredited teachers. The answer is that if a subject is a statutory entitlement for pupils, it is guaranteed that it will be taught in teacher training. If it is not, there is absolutely no guarantee that that is the case. Therefore, the pool of untrained teachers will continue. As my noble friend Lady Massey said, adequate teaching materials should be provided, which is not always the case at the moment. We are talking about timing and flexibility in how the subject is taught, as long as it is taught well and covers the main issues that I will refer to.

I find it extraordinary that the coalition Government-Conservatives and Liberal Democrats-can reject something that prepares young people for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. In doing so, they reject the teaching of mutual respect; valuing each other, which the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, again referred to; loving and happy relationships; safety and health; and responsibility for oneself and others. Last week the Minister referred to the curriculum review, and the need to be innovative, be creative and respond to the needs of pupils. He will find the answer to that in the pamphlet written by his right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith, Early Intervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens. I could quote most of the report in answer to why PSHE should be taught in schools, but one sentence refers to,

"the subject at the heart of this pamphlet: the need for intervention in the earliest years of a child's life, thus ensuring that he or she fulfils their potential and is not subject to intergenerational transmission of disadvantage".

Those are fine words and a fine concept, the fruition of which could be considerably assisted by making PSHE well taught in all schools by making it statutory. Disadvantage can be overcome if the teaching is there to do that.

If for no other reason, the teaching of PSHE makes economic sense because it is about prevention. It is about reducing health inequalities and social exclusion; safeguarding children and young people; reducing homophobic bullying and its consequences; and avoiding teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted illnesses such as HIV, and drug and alcohol misuse. It is about increasing the understanding of the short-term and long-term effects of alcohol on physical and mental health and sexual behaviour. While there is a clear need for sensitive and sensible messages on the avoidance of risk, which can lead to pregnancy or acquiring an STI or HIV, there is also a need to build the confidence-that is what it is all about-for girls to be able to resist the pressure and learn how to say no; and for all children in how to avoid exploitation and abuse.

I was interested in the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, about condoms. He is right: there is a problem in condoms just being delivered to schools. Nobody tells pupils what they are for and why they should be using them sensibly, or not using them at all if they are not having early sex. That is not taught. We are saying that we should make sure the teaching goes alongside giving condoms to young children. At a

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school I visited it was fascinating. Young people were issued with condoms, particularly after school. Some of the younger ones thought that they were balloons and had great fun blowing them up, but some of the older ones sat around and had that important conversation, which should take place in schools.

PSHE teaches young people to respect each other and not to pressurise others to do something that they do not want to do. Teaching children and young people about physical and mental lifestyles will save the NHS and local authorities a considerable amount of money. A further aspect of PSHE that we do not always talk about is that it underpins the employability of young people through the development of personal and social skills which commerce and industry demand in their workforces. It also identifies the necessary flexibility to deal with changing workplace and industrial situations.

PSHE is about economic well-being and financial capability. It can teach about managing money and how to avoid personal debt, and the problems that result from that debt, which sometimes mean considerable cost to the state. It prepares young people for their future roles, such as parents, employers, employees and leaders. A groundbreaking survey, which will be launched in October, asked the views of parents, teachers and governors, particularly as regards the SRE aspect of PSHE in England. It was carried out by the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, the National Association of Head Teachers and the National Governors Association, in partnership with Durex.

The results showed a high level of agreement between the three groups, with 91 per cent of parents, 83 per cent of governors and 83 per cent of teachers believing that it is very important that young people have information on practising safer sex. While the majority of parents believe that PSHE-SRE should be taught in schools, part of the programme should be to engage those parents and provide them with information and practical support to help them develop the confidence to talk to their children about relationships, sexual health, alcohol and drugs, and their responsibilities and attitudes to others.

In that way, perhaps we can break down the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage described in the Early Intervention paper. PSHE teaching is an important way of building relationships with parents. Parents need to be more involved and lessons should not end in school. In the survey to which I have just referred, 84 per cent of parents said that what is taught in schools should be followed up in the home. The dropping of PSHE from the Children, Schools and Families Bill went against the views of parents, teachers, governors, the Youth Parliament and young people. Now that the Government have the opportunity to redress that situation, I hope that they will take it to heart.

Baroness Howe of Idlicote: My Lords, I support a great deal of what has been said today. I shall go back rather further. In the early years of the previous Government, there was an attempt to introduce citizenship. My noble friend Lord Northbourne and I hoped valiantly that young children would be taught not just about their relationships with their parents, but about

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how they would bring up their children and what sort of a parent they should be. Sadly, the whole citizenship exercise disappeared into a vacuum of being taught all around the curriculum, so it was never followed through.

Following on from the Ofsted report, I wish to comment on the success that the schools mentioned had on things such as bullying. In some schools, from the moment a child enters, he or she has a mentor. It is another child's duty to settle the new child into the school. It would be a huge help if that could be taken seriously and become part of the way in which all schools integrate the next generation.

It may not be totally fair to blame the Government-certainly not all members of it-for the way in which the previous Bill disappeared into the sand, but now that they have this opportunity to look at the situation again, I hope that they will come forward with sensible proposals.

Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, the noble Baronesses, Lady Massey of Darwen and Lady Gould, and my noble friend Lady Walmsley, have long been advocates and apostles of PSHE. Their difficulty has been that for a long time PSHE has been regarded as a "trendy left" view which has been dismissed on largely political grounds. Therefore, I want primarily to address my Conservative Party partners in the coalition. Three aspects of PSHE should give them pause.

The first was eloquently stated by the noble Baroness, Lady Gould. It is that huge threats to children, such as drugs and alcohol, need to be discussed seriously within schools at a very early age-the middle of primary school-and onwards if people are to realise their immense and devastating consequences on children. They have to counter great pressure from, on one side, teenage magazines and what one might call youth culture, and, on the other, the supermarket culture. That is not easy to do.

The second issue, which supersedes any political views and which I again ask my partners in the coalition to consider very seriously, is parenthood. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, has been famous for the way in which he has consistently argued in this House that we have neglected at our peril the parenthood of the human species, which is long in growing up. Long ago, when I was Secretary of State, I remember proposing that parenthood should be a fundamental part of sex education. In other words, the emphasis should be at least as much on the responsibilities of bringing up a child-families will devote a huge part of their energies to that process-as on sex education itself. You cannot divorce the two and in some ways we have done great harm to ourselves by doing that. We now look at what one can describe in some quarters only as an abdication of parenthood. I do not refer just to people who are economically deprived but to the many who wrongly think that money substitutes for time in the bringing up of children. There are huge lesions to be mended in our relationships with children. I strongly thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and commend him on the consistency of his arguments in this field, which desperately need to be listened to.

Finally, on the issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and others who said that there are insufficient qualified teachers, conceivably the coalition

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might think of something rather unique and announce that it is its intention to introduce compulsory PSHE-with the emphasis as I have described-in three years' time. That would immediately attract many young people to thinking about teaching in that field. We try to do everything instantaneously. Education, like growing a tree, is a slow process, and we need to think in terms of how one can obtain responses further down the line. In this case, many young people and many others who are coming into the profession would seriously think about a responsible approach to PSHE as part of the curriculum, although it may be unwise to introduce it immediately.

The Lord Bishop of Exeter: My Lords, I begin by commenting on both amendments; I recognise the importance of giving children and young people access to appropriate and high-quality PSHE, for which the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and others made such a compelling and eloquent case. However, I wish mainly to speak to Amendment 70 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. I follow the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, in welcoming the emphasis placed in that amendment on parenting and the need to make young people aware of the parenting responsibilities that come with bringing a child into the world and, again, I salute the work of the noble Lord in this area, especially in helping young men to come to terms with what it means to be a father.

However, I have a couple of concerns with the amendment. First, it is not clear how the resulting curriculum would be determined. Research suggests that aspects of PSHE that have to do with sex and relationships are most effective if parents are involved to the greatest possible extent. That is why the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, about engaging parents, were so well made. While the Church of England has not had a problem with statutory provision, not least with the impact that it has on teacher training provision, I am aware of those, particularly in other churches and faith communities, who feel that the engagement of parents would be more greatly advanced if it was stated explicitly that the curriculum would ultimately be determined, on an academy-by-academy basis, by governors in consultation with parents, so that this important subject is taught in a manner that is consistent with the ethos of the academy and parental wishes.

5.15 pm

Secondly, although one intention of the creation of academies is to bring into being schools with greater freedom, the amendment would in this instance reduce the area of freedom. It would result in a situation where academics teaching children of primary school age would have to teach sex and relationship education, while for other primary schools this would be optional. This would put us in the curious position of creating academies to give them more freedom than other schools, but granting them less freedom in the approach to SRE. I spoke this morning to a major SRE provider that has developed specialist resources for primary schools, and it concurred. There is a good case for saying that it is best to allow primary school governors, in consultation with parents, to determine how this subject is best taught at that age.

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Finally, perhaps I may seek clarification about how the amendment stands in relation to providing parents with the right to withdraw their children from sex education, which obtains in all other schools.

Lord Layard: My Lords, I strongly support the two amendments in this group. In the past 40 years, there have been four surveys of the mental health of 15 year-olds in Britain. These show that the number of young people suffering from emotional and behavioural problems is twice as high now as it was 40 years ago. That is a shocking fact. It is terrible for young people and for the rest of us. We are talking about the health not only of young people, but also of the society that is affected by their behaviour. If we take into account the extraordinary costs for young people and for adults of the problems of young people not knowing how to live, we cannot turn our backs on the emotional and behavioural aspects of their education. We have been moving towards a disastrous situation in which our schools have increasingly become exam factories-factories for helping people to earn a living, not to learn how to live.

It is possible to teach people how to live. This can be done not only through the school's ethos, which is extremely important-as has rightly been stressed, this could be the most important thing-but also through structured teaching of life skills. We already know a lot about how to do this, and we are learning more. For example, the Penn Resilience Programme, now used in 30 schools in this country, has been shown to reduce teenage depression markedly, and to increase school attendance, with emotional and behavioural consequences. Many other equally effective programmes cover areas such as developing altruism, learning about healthy living and avoiding risky behaviour, learning about mental health and learning about parenting-there are programmes that teach young people how to be parents, and others that cover nearly all the topics in the QCA's excellent programme of study for personal and social well-being.

There is also plenty of evidence of the effectiveness of sex education. For example, one striking case is the comparison between our country and the Netherlands, where sex and relationship education, including parenting, begins in primary schools. There, the teenage pregnancy rate is one-fifth of the rate in this county. Therefore, we have plenty of evidence on which to proceed.

These are difficult subjects to teach and that is why I am enormously worried about the coalition Government's approach of leaving them to individual schools. If they are difficult to teach, the most obvious thing to do is to have a concerted programme of teacher training. That can be done only at the national level but, as many speakers have already said, it will not happen unless there is a clear statement that education in life skills is a key element in the complete education of every child.

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, I speak on this matter in a personal capacity and I absolutely support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. I also support much of the spirit behind the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, although I

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think that it is a bit too late to provide sex and relationships education to 14 year-olds, given the hundreds of girls under the age of 14 who get pregnant every year. Good PSHE includes all the information that young people need to lead an ordinary but successful life, or even an extraordinary life. It is not academic but what are schools doing if not preparing young people for the lives that they will lead when they leave and, indeed, the lives that they lead while they are still at school?

Much has been said this afternoon about the importance of teaching about parenting, and I absolutely agree. Noble Lords may have heard about the programme in which school nurses give out baby dolls to young women. These dolls scream in the middle of the night, they need burping, they need their nappy changing and they need feeding regularly. I recently heard about one school nurse who gave out a batch of these dolls and when they came back at the end of the week most of the young girls said, "Oh my goodness. I couldn't possibly", apart from one who said, "It was wonderful. I can't wait to get pregnant", so it does not always work.

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