My Lords, I did not intend to speak in this debate but I have been referred to a few times, due only to the fact that I think I am the only living person in the Chamber who has been Secretary of State for Education.
I feel that this amendment is unnecessary for a variety of reasons. I speak as an Anglican and was rather surprised that my church had taken the view that it has on same-sex marriage. The law of the land will be changed on same-sex marriage, and for the established church to say in effect that it is contracting out of it and not to allow its churches to be used for it is not, I would have thought, in the tradition of Anglicanism—not the Anglicanism that I favour. The history of the Church of England from 1533 onwards shows that it is not so much a question of the tenets or the 39 articles but of what happened with individual vicars in their parish churches. If you look at how English vicars interpreted Anglicanism in the 17thand 18th centuries, there is an infinite variety of activity. I should have thought the Anglican church would have done much better to have followed that practice than the one that it has followed.
That aside, on this particular matter, the position is in fact exceedingly clear. Where the state has provided birth control and various government agencies promote it, teachers in the Catholic Church will make it very clear that this is something which they object to and they think is fundamentally wrong. It is not a tenet of their faith but a practice, and the same is true of divorce. A great deal of discretion is already happening every day in our schools. I think it would happen in this case with the Anglican Church regarding sex education. I went to a primary church school in Lancashire and we did not have any sex education at all. I suppose that sex had not been discovered so much in those days. I even went to a secondary grammar school in
Lancashire for two years and we did not have any sex education there either. I know we were very repressed sort of people—limited and all that—but it was alien to us.
Today it is clear that when sex education is taught in schools—I promoted it when I was Secretary of State—it is very much in the context of a loving relationship. It was the point that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, made. It was not just the act of physical gratification—immediate and then finished with. It was to establish a loving relationship and that was a very essential part of all sex education. So when the matter of marriage comes up, it would be quite possible for any teacher, even a clergyman teacher at a Church of England school, to say they believed very strongly that marriage should be between a man and a wife and the purpose is to create a family. Even when he is talking to 12 and 13 year-olds, they will know a lot about other people who do not live like that. It has all changed today. It will not be a matter of teaching but of discussion—that is what it will be more like in actual practice. The teacher will be able to say, without fear of persecution and quite clearly, “This is the view that we believe in the Anglican Church at the moment, and we think that is the position”. So I believe that this amendment is not necessary.
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