Personal, Social, Health and Financial Education

Debate between Peter Bottomley and Barbara Keeley

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed, and although I am talking about teenage conception affecting girls and young women, the involvement of boys and young men is important too. Beyond the serious issue that I have mentioned of teenage pregnancy, there are new concerns about how young people can be protected from adults who want to groom them for sex or adults who abuse and assault young people, as in the horrific allegations made against Jimmy Savile. Relationship education can equip children with the knowledge and the skills to understand what constitutes inappropriate behaviour from an adult, it can help children to resist pressure from adults who want to harm them, and it can inform children about how to get help and support when they need it.

The National Children’s Bureau feels that PSHE is key to safeguarding children. The PSHE Association says that

“the most important safeguard against grooming and abuse is that young people are equipped to understand what is appropriate and what is not and to develop strategies to stop that abuse.”

The association feels that PSHE is an ideal forum to explore these issues. Equipping children to understand if they are at risk or if they have already been a victim of such exploitation is a primary line of defence against such behaviour. Of course, these issues cannot be dealt with in an ad hoc way, and the importance of training has already been highlighted. This sort of education needs to provided through regular timetabled sessions, delivered by trained staff.

Evidence also points to the important role that PSHE can play in ending or reducing bullying in schools, and this includes work with young carers. In Salford, we are fortunate to have an excellent young carers project. It works in a number of our schools to identify and support young carers, and to develop awareness of the role of children and young people who are carers. Recently, Salford Young Carers has worked with the Lowry theatre to produce a DVD for schools to build awareness of the issues faced by young carers in school. It is entitled, “I am not different, I just do different things”, and I can get lots of copies, so if anyone here is interested in seeing it, I am very willing to make it available.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

In addition to what happens in schools in planned PSHE lessons, may I ask the hon. Lady to reflect on the importance of popular media, such as the radio and magazines that young people have? I would also suggest that people can learn a lot from the way we reduced drink-driving among young people. That was achieved not only by formal lessons at school but by giving people strategies to allow them to avoid drink-driving.

Of course, we must remember that every week between 6,000 and 7,000 people—not just teenagers—contribute to a conception that ends in a termination. Most of those terminations are avoidable if people just use the language that, at the time, prevents them from doing something that will have consequences that they do not really want.

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed. That is the confidence we want to build up.

I was talking about Salford Young Carers and the fabulous DVD that it has produced, so let me get back to the treatment of young carers in schools. The DVD shows the type of caring tasks that young carers take on, how caring affects their performance at school and how it means they cannot take part in activities that other young people have time to engage in. We are fortunate in Salford to have that work being done in our schools, but of course the project is limited by resource constraints. Surprisingly, the project’s staff have also encountered barriers, including a school saying, “We don’t have any young carers,” which most of us will understand is highly unlikely. A dismissive attitude to young carers is also unfair, because many of them are likely to be shouldering practical, emotional and financial responsibilities that are normally taken on only by adults.

Clearly young carers need to be identified and then supported. On 7 September 2012, I introduced a private Member’s Bill in the House, the Social Care (Local Sufficiency) and Identification of Carers Bill; there are a couple of supporters of that Bill here today. On identification, my Bill contained a provision that a local authority must ensure that both the authority itself and the schools within its control have in place a policy that both identifies young carers and makes arrangements to support pupils who are young carers. I commend that provision in my Bill to the Minister, who might just have been in her new role at the time that I introduced the Bill. It is crucial that schools and local authorities across the country do more to identify and support young carers.

I have talked briefly about personal, social, health and economic education and what it could enable schools to provide. As I have just touched on, it could enable support to be provided for young carers and the understanding of their caring role, which often entails taking on practical, emotional and financial responsibilities. It could help action to prevent or reduce bullying in schools. It could help to safeguard children against grooming for sex and attention from or assaults by paedophiles. As I mentioned in the main part of my speech, it could equip girls and young women with the knowledge and skills to avoid unwanted teenage conception. It could give all young people the information and values to enable them to have safe and fulfilling relationships. All those things are beneficial outcomes and very strong reasons to put personal, social, health and economic education on a statutory footing within the national curriculum.

There have been other calls from MPs for elements of the PSHE curriculum to be made compulsory, and I think that there are MPs here today who may talk about those elements. There has been a call for statutory financial literacy education from the all-party group on financial education for young people. A cross-party group of MPs has called for for relationship education to be made statutory—that relates to the subject of teenage pregnancies. There has also been a call, which I am sure we will hear about, for compulsory lessons on body image by the all-party group on body image, as well as a call for a commitment to provide effective drugs education from the Home Affairs Committee in its report, “Drugs: Breaking the Cycle”.

Failing to make important subjects compulsory within the curriculum will mean that some schools’ delivery of education on those vital subjects will be patchy at best, or non-existent at worst. It is time that all our pupils benefited from PSHE subjects being taught as effectively as possible.