Education Bill

My Lords, I particularly support Amendments 26 and 31 which deal with the keeping of records. It is immensely important that in such situations proper records are kept with the kinds of information specified in the amendments—we could perhaps look at them again—and that these records are available to Ofsted and the governing body. This is quite fundamental and will enable the school to know what is going on and what the balance of activities amounts to. I certainly support the importance of training but I think that it should be school-wide. Any teacher could run into such a difficulty and be faced with a problem that could be both threatening and frightening if they had not had to formally think about it before. On Amendment 20 and the reference to security staff, I was left uncertain about how this would apply in small primary schools. If we press ahead with the amendment, small primary schools probably would not have the capacity to have someone specially trained. It would be useful to hear what the intention of the amendment is because there seems to be some variation. I accept what my noble friend Lady Perry says is critical: there are crisis situations and legislation must allow for dealing with these. A last, doubtless very naive, thought: could some of the problems of intimacy and same sex be dealt with if schools had electronic scanning devices available? These would probably be as cheap as specialist training courses and would pick up electronic implements—phones and so on, which can be a source of great trouble—and weapons. They would not pick up drugs—I accept that—but electronic implements and weapons cause crises which have to be dealt with very quickly. Regulation is very important but the threat that you will be scanned then makes an issue of it. It could be a practical, simple way of taking some of the sting out of this.