Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education, and Health Education — House of Lords, 2019-02-25
Topic: Education
Theodore Agnew (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, on the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, I hope I will address most of them here, but I will write on any that I have missed On funding, this is a ring-fenced sum of money. It comes out of the DfE budget, but as noble Lords will know, the DfE budget runs to tens of billions of pounds. This sum is allocated for this. I accept that the sum does not sound like a lot per school. One of the reasons why we are keen for schools to start to roll out this training in September of this year, before it becomes compulsory, is to get feedback from them on their experiences and whether they will need additional support A lot of resources are already out there, and they are good quality. For example, there is the Sex Education Forum, which, according to its website, which I looked at today, is endorsed by the ASCL, Unison and the NEU. These are all good-quality resources. It will be a matter of schools learning how to access them. If they feel there are gaps, they will feed that back to us and we will respond On how many teachers will be trained, we want to see this soft rollout starting in September to get a sense of how profound the additional training needs will be, going beyond what schools are already doing on PSHE, health education and other elements which are already in the curriculum. It will be a matter of seeing how much further they need to go from where they are at the moment, which also ties in with the question about room in the curriculum. There is already space in the curriculum for much of this, and we envisage there being adequate space. I will come on to that again when I answer the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Addington On the right to withdraw, this is a very difficult balancing act. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, made the point that we were always going to upset some people on either end of the spectrum. We believe the prevailing thrust of this is that parents should have responsibility for educating their children on these sensitive matters. We brought in the rule about three terms prior to age 16 because that is the legal age of consent for sexual intercourse, so it is important that some training is made available to children before then On "exceptional circumstances", I think the term is what it is. It is extremely difficult to predict what these circumstances might be. We will see from our soft rollout starting in September if circumstances arise which are sensitive and need addressing. However, our view is that we want schools to make the judgments based on what is age appropriate and relevant to their own communities. Clearly, a metropolitan school might have a different kind of child who is more advanced in their understanding of the world than a child in a rural area. We have to be flexible on that On the issue of LGBT, which the noble Lord, Lord Watson, raised, we are very aware of the concern about bullying. The subjects are designed to educate pupils about healthy relationships. We have been clear that schools have flexibility on how they develop this, but in the Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance, for example, which we rolled out last year, we focused very much on bullying between children and situations where people may be of a different sexuality. Turning to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I thank him for acknowledging the cross-party support for this. It was heartening to listen to the debate in the other place this afternoon and see the strong cross-party support. I hope I have addressed some of the funding issues in my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Watson. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, raised the point about ongoing focus in this area. I absolutely agree that this is a Department for Education responsibility. A question was raised in the other place about the fact that it has been 19 years since we last did this and it better not be another 19 years before the next review. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State was keen to indicate that this would probably be reviewed every three years, but possibly more often. We absolutely accept that On SEND, coming back to my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, about teaching being age appropriate, it also has to be appropriate for the mental development of a child. If a child’s special educational needs are particularly severe, schools will need to be more sensitive to the needs of that child, but as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, quite rightly says, with many SEND issues such as dyslexia, it will not really make any difference and the child would be treated in the same way.