Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to various noble Lords for addressing my amendments. It makes it much easier for me to go through them. I can see that Amendment 297 will not gain favour with the Liberal Democrats, but my general approach is that we should trust schools and teachers; we should not bind them in red tape as though they did not know how to behave. By and large, teachers and schools will conduct themselves sensibly. Any school that went in for excessive amounts of searching would soon find its discipline and morale breaking down. Such matters have to be handled sensibly and with caution. If one trusts schools, schools must also trust their pupils and, if the system of trust breaks down, one is in deep trouble. I am in favour of giving schools a fairly wide brief as regards the circumstances in which they can search. I believe that they will use it wisely. Hooking schools on technicalities just because we have not thought what the next problem will be and what will cause problems is foolish. I also agree with what my noble friend said about protecting teachers, although I have not addressed that in my amendments. It is enormously important that teachers should be presumed to be in the right and should not be presumed to be wrong when they undertake what is a difficult and tricky task of persuading a pupil to let themselves be searched. We ought to start by trusting teachers. In Amendment 297B, which would leave out lines 40 to 43 on page 140, I address the concept of schools’ security staff. I live in a cosseted world and I do not think that I have ever been into a school that employs security staff, other than perhaps a caretaker—for example, members of staff whose job is nothing but security, as defined in subsection (8) of new Section 550ZB. They are not teachers who have had training, but people who are employed solely for security reasons, as if our schools are to have bouncers walking around. I do not think that, even temporarily, that is the right way for a school to deal with a difficult situation or that it is right to have that as a constant feature of a school. I accept what the noble Baroness says about training teachers to do that. This ought to be done by teachers—the people with whom the pupil is familiar, someone who knows the pupil, who knows how to handle the pupil and who has been trained in such things—rather than by some security apparatchik who presumably spends most of their time sitting in a dark room watching telly, waiting for that one time in three months when someone blows the whistle because they want to check whether a boy has a knife. I question the idea of confining the powers to specialist security staff. Amendment 302A and the subsequent amendments relate to the discretion of teachers not to call in the police. As noble Baronesses have remarked, this is a difficult area to get right and they have favoured calling in the police on every occasion. I prefer to see the school and teachers in loco parentis. There are occasions when it should be in a teacher’s discretion not to place on a child’s record what is an extremely difficult black mark to eradicate. To be caught in the possession of drugs means that you will never be allowed to go to the United States as a result. You are dropping the child down a deep, black hole if you get them involved in a conviction for carrying drugs when perhaps all they have done is something foolish, idiotic and teenage. I want to trust teachers and to give them the kind of discretion that I expect schools and head teachers in the private sector ordinarily to exercise. When I see a drugs bust and 33 kids from Winchester had up for possessing pot, I do not believe that tipping all 33 children into police cells for the night is the right way to treat them. The school is there to look after them as a parent and it must judge whether the behaviour is idiocy or serious. I agree that that is difficult. I shall not press the amendment but, given the opposition from noble Baronesses whose views I greatly respect, I shall think and inquire about it. However, I believe that automatically tipping children into the hands of the police because of something that happens at school is a difficult way for a school to behave towards its children. It changes the spirit of the school and it is a difficult ask of the parents to consign their children into the hands of such uncaring and thoughtless institutions.