Education and Inspections Bill

I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, for moving this amendment on an extremely difficult and not very popular subject. I declare an interest as one of those involved in setting up the body known as FACT—Falsely Accused Carers and Teachers—with the noble Earl, Lord Howe, in this place and Claire Curtis-Thomas in another place. There is no doubt that it has become something of an industry for some people to make allegations of a kind that have no substance against parents and teachers. We came across a number of examples over the past couple of years of people who had reasons, not any justified claim, that led them to make allegations against teachers that were simply false—in some cases because they believed that they had been wrongly graded, in other cases because they believed that their references had gone against them, and matters of that kind. All this was made worse in the instances that I know most about, which related to the investigations conducted by the North Wales Police and the Merseyside Police into cases involving child carers and teachers, by a method known as trawling, whereby all those involved in a particular school or childcare home were approached and asked whether they wished to make any allegations. That, to say the least, was unfortunate, because in some cases it encouraged those who had no particular allegations to make to give evidence against teachers and carers, possibly with a cohort of their fellows from the same class. This is an extraordinarily difficult issue. Justified claims of harassment, misbehaviour and so on against teachers are among the most sensitive and difficult cases that Ministers in the Department for Education and Skills or, for that matter, the Home Office ever have to deal with. It is an extraordinarily difficult balance to strike. Wherever one strikes it, one is likely to create a huge industry and a huge loss of reputation. Nevertheless, the crucial thing—and I believe that the noble Baroness has got it right—is to protect the teacher against whom allegations are made until there has been a proper opportunity to investigate. That protection has been breached in the past where such allegations and rumours have been spread about, which has led, as the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, said, to people losing their entire careers as schoolmasters or schoolmistresses, and in some cases to their families being wrecked by the community picking up false allegations against the person concerned. So, speaking simply from the background of what knowledge I have of this, which is obviously limited but which shows the acute agony of these kinds of cases, I would certainly commend the effort by the noble Baroness to try to limit the damage caused. I commend the amendment, which may contain purely technical difficulties, but which seems to me to try to address a very difficult and not particularly popular issue.