Personal, Social, Health and Financial Education

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson.

The schools White Paper “The Importance of Teaching” announced a review to determine how to support schools to improve the quality of teaching in personal, social, health and economic education, PSHE, including giving teachers the flexibility to use their judgment on how best to deliver it. In launching the review, the then Minister with responsibility for schools, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), said that Ofsted had reported some weaknesses in the schools visited. Although PSHE was judged to be good to outstanding in three quarters of the schools, the report noted that pupils needed more knowledge and better understanding in education on relationships, drugs and alcohol, and mental and emotional health.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

From her experience as a member of the Health Committee, will my hon. Friend say something about the role that PSHE might play in ensuring that young people in this country are as healthy as possible?

[Barbara Keeley]

That is an important point, and I will come on to it. The PSHE Association has argued for the following key education themes to be included: health, relationships, careers and the world of work and personal finance. The consultation on the Government’s review finished on 30 November 2011. Will the Minister tell us when we can expect to see a revised programme of study for PSHE? On 9 January, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) received an answer to a question on drugs education telling her:

“Revised draft programmes of study…will be sent out for consultation in due course and consultation responses received will be taken into account before final programmes of study are published later this year.”—[Official Report, 9 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 341W.]

May we have more clarity on dates for those revised draft programmes?

I would like to focus mainly on relationship education, which is a key issue in my constituency and for Salford as a local authority, because teenage pregnancy rates are a continuing concern for us. The latest published statistics show that the teenage conception rate in Salford is 57 conceptions per 1,000 young women. That is higher than the north-west region, which has a conception rate of 40 per 1,000, and considerably higher than England and Wales, which have a rate of 35 per 1,000. The latest figure for Salford is the highest in Greater Manchester and, depressingly, it is more than three points higher than the previous year’s figure. That is a clear issue for Salford, because it goes against the national trend. In Salford, the teenage conception rate has declined by only 3% since 1998, while in the north-west the rate reduced by 11% and in England and Wales the reduction was almost 16%. What that means in human terms, which is the most important thing, is that since 1998, between 215 and 250 young women under 18 in Salford have become pregnant in any one year, and 130 to 185 babies are born to mothers in that young age group in any year.

When action to reduce teenage pregnancy rates in Salford seemed to have stalled in 2007, the council’s children’s services scrutiny committee commissioned an inquiry into the extent and effectiveness of relationship education in our schools and colleges. The inquiry report commented:

“Teenage pregnancy is a serious social problem. Having children at a young age can damage young women’s health and well-being and severely limit their education and career prospects. While individual young people can be competent parents, all the evidence shows that children born to teenagers are much more likely to experience a range of negative outcomes in later life.”

The inquiry sent a survey questionnaire to all schools and colleges in Salford. It found that where the teaching of PSHE was not seen as a priority, the delivery of relationship education was not as effective.

--- Later in debate ---

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) on securing this important debate. She clearly set out why PSHE is so important. I am pleased to contribute to the debate, because I have a long-standing interest in the issue.

As a Minister in the previous Government, I took through the provisions to introduce PSHE as a statutory part of the national curriculum. It was hugely disappointing that, although the Liberal Democrats supported the Labour Government, the Conservative party declined to support the proposals introduced in 2010 and scuppered them in the wash-up, so preventing them from becoming law. It was striking that the Conservative party failed to engage with the overwhelming evidence that high-quality PSHE needed to be taught, and taught by well-qualified, well-trained teachers, and that it needed to be given sufficient time in the curriculum. The Conservative party also failed to understand that most parents wanted relationship and sex education taught in schools. Young people themselves say that they want it taught, and that includes not just the practicalities of which bit of the anatomy goes where.

As we have heard, when the Government came into power, they published the schools White Paper “The Importance of Teaching”, announcing the review of PSHE. The consultation was launched on 21 January 2011 and ended on 30 November 2011. We have been waiting 14 months to hear something from Ministers about their review, so last November I decided to ask them what was going on. I tabled a question asking the Secretary of State for Education

“on what date his Department’s review of personal, social health and education stopped receiving submissions; and when he plans to publish the results of that review.”

The Minister who is here today said:

“The public consultation phase of the internal review of…PSHE…ended in November 2011. The review will take account of the outcomes of the ongoing national curriculum review and we will publish conclusions in due course.”—[Official Report, 19 November 2012; Vol. 553, c. 369W.]

I wondered why it had taken the Department for Education so long to deal with the issue. What has been happening in the Department since November 2011? Perhaps Ministers wanted to listen further to expert groups in the field to fully understand and appreciate all the compelling evidence about PSHE. Perhaps Ministers have been having extensive meetings and further evidence-gathering sessions, so that they can give us the evidence-based policy decision making that they keep telling us they are so keen on.

I therefore thought that I would ask a few more questions. I asked the Secretary of State

“which groups he has met with to discuss relationship education in the latest period for which figures are available; and which groups he intends to meet for discussions on relationship education in the next 12 months.”

The Minister responded that the Secretary of State had met the hon. Members for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands), for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) and for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes)

“to discuss sex and relationship education on 8 February 2011. The Secretary of State has no such meetings planned in the next 12 months.”—[Official Report, 7 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 69W.]

I was a bit worried by that.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Diana Johnson]

I am very keen to give way as the hon. Lady was at the meeting.

[Dr Coffey]

I simply wanted to say, just so that the hon. Lady is clear, that the four of us requested the meeting, as opposed to being invited in.

[Diana Johnson]

I am pleased that the Secretary of State agreed to meet that small group of Conservative Members of Parliament and that there was a least one female Member of Parliament present, because the rest were all white men. There has been no mention of any other groups being invited in to meet a Minister. I thought the PSHE Association, the Churches, End Violence Against Women or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children might have been invited in to meet the Secretary of State, but no. A group of experts on violence against women and girls has been trying for some time to get a meeting with the Department to discuss the issue. Would the Minister agree to meet them to hear what they have to say on the role of PSHE in combating domestic violence?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is making an important point. One thing that I think that she will agree is most concerning is the alarmingly large number of young boys and young girls who think that it is acceptable for a boy to hit a girl or to force her to have sex when she says she does not want to.

[Diana Johnson]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes the point very well.

Although Ministers have met none of the groups I thought they might have, extensive evaluations might have been going on of the education programmes available on PSHE. I therefore asked the Secretary of State another question:

“what lifeskills educational programmes (a) he and (b) his Department has evaluated.”

In response, the Minister said:

“This Department is in the process of assessing the strength of the evaluation of Botvin Life Skills Training Programme. Once completed, the assessment will be added to the Department’s open-access database of evaluations of programmes aimed at improving outcomes for young people.”—[Official Report, 17 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 585W.]

There was therefore a little glimmer of hope, but there was no mention of one of the most successful, biggest and best-informed education programmes developed in the UK, the Good Behaviour Game. I therefore asked another question:

“what representations his Department has received on the effectiveness of the Good Behaviour Game as a lifeskills programme; and if he will commission a review of the effectiveness of the programme within the English curriculum.”

It is worth noting that, at first, the Department thought the Good Behaviour Game was about discipline and not that it was a life-skills programme. It worried me that it did not seem to know the difference. In response, the Minister said:

“The Department has not received any representations in respect of the effectiveness of the Good Behaviour Game as a lifeskills programme. The Government has no plans to commission a review of the effectiveness of this programme.”—[Official Report, 7 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 81W.]

The Department is obviously not spending a great deal of time looking at or evaluating educational life-skills programmes, so perhaps it is focusing on the individual components of PSHE. I therefore thought I would ask some questions about relationship education. I asked the Secretary of State

“what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of relationship education”—

this goes to the point that was just raised—

“in…combating violence against women and girls and…changing attitudes towards domestic violence; what evidence on these issues has been presented to his Department in the last five years; what plans he has to review any such evidence; and if he will make a statement.”

This answer was a little better. The Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), said:

“There is some evidence, such as Taylor et al 2010, showing that schools-based programmes can improve awareness, attitudes and knowledge of gender violence and harassment prevention. Relationship education can be provided by schools as part of…PSHE…It is for schools to determine what they teach on these issues”.—[Official Report, 17 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 586W.]

The Minister went on to say that the Department was part of a cross-Government committee that looks at violence against women and girls and that it was “responsible for some actions”—he was not very specific—to deal with the issue. It therefore seems rather depressing that the Department accepts that relationship education can be effective in combating violence against women, but it seems to have no plans as to how that should be promoted.

What is the Department saying about alcohol? I asked the Secretary of State

“what assessment he has made of the role of alcohol education within the curriculum; what representations his Department has received on the nature and effectiveness of alcohol education; whether he plans to review such evidence; and what steps he intends to take to improve the quality and prevalence of alcohol education in schools.”—[Official Report, 14 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 527W.]

The answer, which is quite shocking, is that the Department

“has not conducted a specific assessment of alcohol education within the curriculum.”

The answer continues:

“From April 2013 a new two-year contract will be in place to deliver information and advice to practitioners, including teachers, in the field of drug and alcohol education. It will build on the best of national and international practice”—

I do not know how the Department will do that, because it does not seem to evaluate anything—

“and ensure commissioners and practitioners understand the evidence-base and use programmes known to be effective.”—[Official Report, 14 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 528W.]

Will the Minister tell us how that will happen and how it will fit with the drugs education forum? Its role was to bring together good practice from agencies, and it did that for the modest sum of £69,000, which was cut by the Government when they came into power and then hastily reinstated when they realised what a good job it did.

I turn to the PSHE review and drugs education—perhaps things will be better in relation to drugs. Again, I asked the Secretary of State what

“assessment he has made of the role of drugs education within the curriculum; what representations his Department has received on the nature and effectiveness of drugs education; whether he plans to review such evidence”.

The Minister replied:

“Pupils are currently taught about the negative physiological effects of drugs as part of the statutory National Curriculum Programmes of Study for science, and may also receive wider drugs education as part of non-statutory Personal, Health and Economic (PSHE) Education.”—[Official Report, 9 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 341W.]

It is disappointing that the Government do not seem to understand the importance of comprehensive drugs education in our schools. Drugs has cross-departmental reach, and I thought, perhaps naively, that much work was going on at that level. From another parliamentary question, however, I discovered that Education Ministers have attended the inter-ministerial group on drugs only four times out of 12. I also obtained the agendas for those meetings and, shockingly, drugs education has never been on the group’s agenda.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Was my hon. Friend able to ascertain through parliamentary questions whether the 66% failure to attend those meetings was down to authorised or unauthorised absences by Education Ministers?

[Diana Johnson]

My hon. Friend makes an important point that the Minister will perhaps address.

I am conscious that I have taken up quite a lot of time, but I am concerned that the Government, who have set up a review, seem to have failed to conduct it properly. Although I am sure that all hon. Members recognise the importance of PSHE and life skills, the Government need some lessons in how to govern effectively and how to review evidence and to make decisions based on that evidence.