Education Bill

I shall to speak briefly to this amendment and to this clause. I am motivated in large part by the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood. I wrestled with this subject as a Minister and came under a lot of pressure to bring in a clause such as Clause 13. My judgment at the time was that it would be a slippery slope—the slippery slope that has been described by the noble Lord—and that it would start to include an awful lot of people. The NSPCC put the argument very strongly that we should not go down the road in Clause 13 and that it would be better for children if we put pressure on the enforcement authorities to get on with it and bring cases to justice where there was a case to be put. I was pleased that we managed to get some agreement from the Association of Chief Police Officers to accelerate things. It will be interesting if the Minister has any information about whether that genuinely accelerated things or whether the Minister was just told that it accelerated things. Probably that is where my instincts lie. A better way of dealing with things is that the police should not feed information to the press and that they should get on with prosecution if that is what needs to be done. Then the blight that can affect professionals in schools as a result of false allegations can be lifted very quickly because there is no doubt of the seriousness of the problem for some individuals. However, if we are going to have Clause 13, I support the amendments put by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes. If you are going to give this protection to people who work in schools, you need to give this protection to all people who work in schools. These days, we see support staff, in particular, doing a range of work. In a lot of cases, it is support staff who are doing one-to-one work in schools, not the higher-qualified person, who is left to deal with the majority. If there is a case to be made for teachers, there has to be a case made for support staff. The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, made a very strong case in respect of FE colleges, which are starting to educate under-16s. I suppose I am trying to be slightly consensual in saying that I understand and, in the end, kind of agree that I am sceptical about Clause 13 but, if we are going to do it, let us do it properly.