Education Bill

My Lords, I want to make just a couple of quick points, giving the lateness of the hour. The first is that the draft guidance that seems to be floating around, the status of which I am sure that the noble Lord will know better than I, explicitly states under the heading of training for school staff that there is no legal requirement for a head teacher or authorised member of staff to be trained before undertaking a ““without consent”” search. That is a statement of fact because there is no legal requirement, but if you are issuing guidance, would it not make sense to say something like, ““But we think it is a jolly good idea””? It is almost a prescription not to bother to do the training. I may have the status of the guidance wrong, but my point is worth taking on board. The second point concerns the final issue that the Minister raised, which was about keeping records. There was a contradiction with what a number of noble Lords said about the need for consistent record keeping so that Ofsted can check what is going on and the department can have an idea of whether there are unforeseen consequences of the searches. We all want to know what the big picture is, and we can only do that if we have consistent records. The noble Lord said that we should trust schools to keep their own records, but there is a contradiction here—and also with the requirement under the Equality Act that he talked about. I will return to the issue about what schools should be required to do in terms of keeping records to comply with fairness and meet the requirements of the legislation. I do not think that we have fully fleshed that out.