My Lords, in a child’s life there are two periods of rapid brain development. The first is during the first three years of life, while the second is around the time of puberty, in the early teens. That is scientific fact. If we want to reduce the number of dysfunctional families and disadvantaged children in our society, we must do more to prepare young people in their early teens for their future task of forming and bringing up a family. Many young people will learn these skills from their own family, of course, but sadly others will not be so lucky.
Statistics suggest that only 50% of children born today will be living with both parents by the time that they are 16. The statistics show that lone-parent households are 2.5 times more likely to be in poverty than couple families, and today in the UK there are over 3 million growing up in lone-parent families. I have one more statistic: in a recent report, the Centre for Social Justice found that 89% of people agreed that if we wanted to have any hope of mending what they called our “broken society”, family and parenting was where we had to start. The role of schools in developing personal, social and emotional skills must therefore remain very important for many young people today; I think we all agree on that. A great deal of this has been said already, so I shall try to skip through it.
Preparation for family formation and parenthood is not just about knowing the facts of life; it is about recognising that having a child is a serious responsibility; about learning to be the kind of person that you want to be to your child and that your child will need; and about requiring the interpersonal and emotional skills that your child will want in order to create a secure home and for the children to develop in a healthy manner. This is an important point: young people in puberty, or around that time, are keen to find out more about what it means to be an adult, what adult life is about and what the challenges and opportunities of adult life are. It creates an opportunity for schools to help them, because they are in school at that age. In doing so, of course, schools must work with parents. Schools can and often do have a huge influence on a child’s personal and social development, particularly the soft skills, which we seem to have forgotten in our education system but which are so important, both for family formation and for the workplace, and indeed in society as a whole.
Of course the best schools are already doing a wonderful job but, alas, many schools are not doing that job well. Recent Ofsted reports make grim reading. Far too many secondary schools are still treating personal and social development as an unimportant subject, and there is a chronic lack of well trained specialist PSHE and SRE teachers. The Government’s policy today is—rightly, I suspect—to give more freedom to schools to develop their own curriculums. Outside the core curriculum, the Government will not prescribe a school’s curriculum. This puts a lot more responsibility on the schools themselves to get it right. In an area of learning as sensitive and important as PSHE, it is essential that parents, Parliament and the wider public should be able to know what each school is doing, what their policies are and whether they are actively pursuing those policies.
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Some of your Lordships may say that schools already have an obligation to publish their curricula but I have seen a number of curricula and most of them give nothing like the amount of detail that would be necessary. I got the Library to make inquiries about six secondary schools around where I live in eastern Kent. We got the six sets of curriculum details. Of those six, five made virtually no mention of PSHE or the personal and social development programme. The sixth, which I am proud to say was in Deal, my town, has done an absolutely brilliant job, with six pages. So it can be done. I have brought this copy for the Minister and had some other copies printed off, which I will put on the Table in case other noble Lords might be interested. It is quite an interesting document.
A statutory statement such as the one I have proposed in this amendment would oblige all schools teaching young people in key stage 3 to, first, think about, secondly, clearly spell out and, thirdly, make an annual statement of how they are getting on with pursuing their policy. That would put a certain amount of pressure on schools without being prescriptive—not telling them what to do but saying, “You tell us what you are doing and then we can argue about whether or not it is the right thing”. I beg to move.