Education Bill

My Lords, I support my noble friend. I was not going to speak, but this important point strays into another agenda that is relevant here because we could be doing something that is not great. When I have visited schools, I have seen that mobile phones present a real issue—a huge potential advantage and a current problem. Schools are struggling to know what to do. Coincidentally, on Tuesday I was in a good secondary school in Cambridge that, to be honest, was not faced with huge behavioural problems. I accept that it was not your average challenged secondary school. Its approach to mobile phones gave a clue as to how important they will be on the information technology agenda. Given that the Government do not have much of an IT agenda, with the abolition of Becta we must look at what schools are doing on that. I hope that in the coming months we might get to the point technologically at which we can as a society support schools in using devices such as mobile phones as an essential part of learning in school and with links to home. That is not for now and that agenda is not quite here at the moment. I would hate to do anything now that would give a message that would make it difficult for some unconfident schools to move along that road in future years.