Children, Schools and Families Bill

As my noble Friend said in another place last night, every secondary school has such lessons in the curriculum. We must be careful about how prescriptive we are about aspects of the curriculum. We were happy to allow clause 11 to go through. It is only advice that the Minister is receiving that is forcing him and the Government to withdraw, in a slightly petulant manner, all four of the PSHE clauses simply because we are so opposed to just one of them, clause 14. The proposed licence to practise for teachers would have done nothing to raise standards and would have been an expensive and bureaucratic burden for hundreds of thousands of teachers. The Secretary of State's view, as set out in his letter to my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) yesterday, is that""the proposed licence to practise would have firmly established the professional standing of the workforce and provided teachers with the status they deserve"." That, though, is not the view of teachers. It is not the view of ASCL, it is not the view of the NASUWT. It is not the view of the NUT, which said that it""can see no argument advanced by the Government which justifies the introduction of the licence to practise for teachers."" The NUT pointed out that""in little over a month 17,500 teachers have completed a postcard or signed a petition to the Secretary of State to express their concern about the proposed licence to practise."" I suspect that that figure is significantly higher by now. Christine Blower is quoted today as saying:""We are delighted that the licence to practise has gone. It added nothing positive to teaching."" The General Teaching Council, which the Government wanted to administer the licence to practise, stated that""it will be a challenge to develop a system which has sufficient rigour to make a positive impact on standards of practice, whilst remaining proportionate and not unduly burdensome for teachers, school leaders and schools"." Even the body charged with running the scheme is against it. If all the teacher unions are against it and as the Opposition are against it, we are pleased that the Government have backed down and are withdrawing the associated clauses, too. Finally, I am delighted that our sustained opposition to the Bill's draconian and excessive proposals to regulate home education has resulted in the Government's decision to abandon those clauses as well. We have always stressed that the choice to educate a child at home should belong solely and entirely to parents. As my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath said on Second Reading:""It is a basic right of parents to be able to educate their children in accordance with their own wishes, and to educate them at home if they so wish."—[Official Report, 11 January 2010; Vol. 503, c. 456.]" Home educators across the country will be extremely relieved to be spared compulsory registration and monitoring. As my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) correctly pointed out, there is a need for support for home-educating families, but only if the Government can""work co-operatively and voluntarily with parents"—[Official Report, 23 February 2010; Vol. 506, c. 262.]" For now, it is enough that home-educating parents will not be subjected to the dictatorial provisions of the Bill. We can only hope that the hostility between local authorities and home educators, which the Government created with the publication of the Badman report and exacerbated during the passage of the Bill, does not rule out the possibility of creating a practicable and mutually acceptable working arrangement between home educators and local authorities in the future. However, the 50,000 home educators in this country need to take heed of the final paragraph of the Secretary of State's letter to my hon. Friend, in which he states:""I will be campaigning to ensure that this Government is returned and that these measures do make it on to the statute book in the first session of the new Parliament."" Labour is clearly committed to reintroducing the clauses on home education if it is re-elected. The Bill would have entangled teachers, head teachers, pupils, parents, local authorities and school governors in unnecessary red tape, while doing nothing tangible to raise standards. We are glad that the Government have dropped so many of the Bill's clauses, and we look forward to a new Conservative education Bill in a new Parliament which would make the reforms so urgently needed to improve our education system for teachers, pupils and parents alike.