Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he has plans to make sleep lessons compulsory for (a) primary and (b) secondary pupils as part of the Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education in the National Curriculum.

The Department is making relationships education compulsory in all primary schools, and relationships and sex education (RSE) compulsory in all secondary schools. Health education will also become compulsory in all primary and secondary schools. Pupils should be taught the facts about their health to enable them to make good decisions, including lessons about the importance of sleep.

The draft guidance and regulations for the new subjects of relationships education, RSE and health education were laid in Parliament on Monday 25 February. All schools will be required to teach the subjects from September 2020, but they will be encouraged and supported to start teaching them from September 2019 on a voluntary basis.

The draft guidance sets out that pupils should be taught the facts about sleep and about how insufficient sleep can affect both physical health and mental wellbeing, including a person’s weight, mood and ability to learn. Information and resources used should be age appropriate and medically accurate. Existing resources for teaching about sleep as part of health education are already available for schools to use. Examples of these are the PSHE Association’s recently quality assured teaching resources on sleep, as in the following link: https://www.pshe-association.org.uk/curriculum-and-resources/resources/sleep-factor-lesson-plans.