The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, covered the fact that no one in your Lordships’ Chamber would want sex education to be taught other than in the context of relationships, responsibility, caring and consideration for others. That alone makes this particular group of amendments collectively flawed.
I think that the noble Lord, Lord Eden, may have grown up in a different background to mine. On the sex education that parents rely on schools to provide,
on occasion it was ever thus, particularly in a girls’ school. We got a picture of two rabbits upside-down with no explanation as to what it meant. That was sex education in a girls’ grammar school, together with, “You may, in writing, put in questions and the doctor will answer those that she has time for”. We were told that we might wash our hair while menstruating but nothing about sex and childbirth. This is not new.
Of course, the guidance—I see the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in his place—already refers to responsiveness to religious, cultural and age backgrounds. We have to remember that the Bill deals with nursery, infant, primary and secondary pupils up to the age when those pupils can be married. It would be foolish for us to try to draft, in what would be deemed a large Committee, wording suitable for all those pupils. I hope we will not do that because the law of unintended consequences works very well when committees draft things.
On the previous day of Committee on this Bill I referred to the fact that my experience comes from being a parent and grandmother, and from chairing the education committees of county councils in England and Wales, and, more importantly, in the county of Lancashire for 10 years. In a county such as Lancashire, with a large number of church schools, not all children who go to church schools do so by choice but because of location. Not all parents who want church schools get them in the particular denomination that they want—again, not through choice but because of location. I am not in any way critical of the education given to children in church schools. I remind noble Lords that we are talking about church and religious schools in this amendment. We should not try to draft how those teachers respond in terms of both sex education and the importance of family life. I plead that people allow teachers to respond to the pupils in their classes and to their circumstances.
Same-sex marriage is not the only issue where religious beliefs affect the views and attitudes of parents of children in the class. Think about the schools in Lancashire, some of them church schools, where the majority of children are Muslim. Think about the fact that many churches—not all of them—have a view that divorce is wrong. You cannot avoid the fact that there will be children in the class who live with divorced parents. Think about the issues there are with abortion. Teachers have had to learn to live with their consciences and the guidance from the Department for Education.
I worry when the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, refers to the fact that future Secretaries of State might do this or that. It is no good framing legislation on the basis of who might do something in future. We have seen lots of Secretaries of State. Some have done some things, some have done others. To start trying to draft legislation against a particular view that might come up from a future, as yet unknown Secretary of State is foolish.
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