Education Committee
Oral evidence: Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education and Sex and Relationships Education in Schools, HC 145
Tuesday 4 November 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 4 November 2014.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– PSHE Association (SRE0385)
– Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England (SRE0442)
– Explore – Students Exploring Marriage (SRE0205)
– Public Health England (SRE0454)
– Young Enterprise (SRE0365)
– Mentor (SRE0213)
– Personal Finance Education Group (pfeg) (SRE0111)
– The British Youth Council (SRE0034)
– Family Education Trust (SRE0271)
Members present: Mr Graham Stuart (Chair), Alex Cunningham, Bill Esterson, Pat Glass, Siobhain McDonagh, Caroline Nokes, Mr Dominic Raab, Mr David Ward, Craig Whittaker
Witnesses: Dr Graham Ritchie, Principal Policy Adviser, Office of the Children’s Commissioner, Sarah Carter, Trustee, Family Education Trust, Joe Hayman, Chief Executive, PSHE Association, and Natasha Browne, Former Chair, Youth Select Committee on “A Curriculum for Life” gave evidence.
Q106 Chair: Good morning and welcome. Thank you for appearing before us today. We tend to be quite casual here and use first names. I hope you are comfortable with that. I will perhaps start off by pointing out that the National Audit Office reported last week and it said that the DfE’s principal measures of school performance are focused on educational performance, and therefore limited. Its main focus is educational performance; the measures do not reflect, in a timely way, the full range of children’s outcomes that can be affected by education. So, alongside exam results, how should schools be judged on the longer term outcomes for young people, whether that is ability to deal with finances or the rate of teenage pregnancy? How do you think we create a framework in which we get the balance right between the academic and the wider sets of issues that PSHE aims to capture? Who would like to start off? Everyone is looking down very successfully. Joe, you are going to have to go first.
Joe Hayman: I would like to have a go at that. I will start by referring to section 78 of the Education Act 2002, which states that every state-funded school should offer a curriculum which is “balanced and broadly based”, and which promotes the pupils’ “spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development”, and “prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences” of life. Just walking down here today, I saw a group of school pupils coming to visit Westminster, and I was reflecting on something someone told me yesterday, which is that many children starting school this September will live to see the 22nd Century. That is something worth reflecting on when we think about how schooling is judged.
It is really important that we do not see PSHE and the outcomes that we are seeking to achieve as exclusive from academic attainment. There is really good evidence suggesting a strong link between health and well-being, and academic achievement. We also know that businesses are looking now for pupils coming out of schools not just with academic results but also with the kind of soft skills that they need for the world of work. The British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI, are consistently saying this, so I think we need a more rounded set of measures for schools to reflect that.
Q107 Chair: What does that look like? That is what we are trying to undertake. Everyone would agree with that. It is delivering it that is a bit more challenging.
Joe Hayman: Sure. In our submission, we talked at length about the way in which Ofsted could measure the work of schools, and I commend the changes that are set out in Ofsted’s consultation process. But I think it is really important as well that there are some outcome measures in terms of the ways that schools are preparing children for life and work.
I am not particularly keen on a GCSE in PSHE. I think it is something that is hard to measure in that way. It is not a subject where two plus two always equals four. But I do think there are ways in which businesses, universities and the top academic institutions could come together to think of some kind of award that would provide an opportunity for schools to reflect the ways in which children develop those soft skills for life and for work.
Q108 Bill Esterson: Should PSHE be a separate, stand-alone subject, or set of subjects, or should it be mixed in as part of the curriculum? I will give you an example. I heard about some parts of the United States where the dangers of alcohol are integrated all the way through the curriculum in the different subjects where that is relevant. Should we be doing something more like that, or should it be a completely separate, stand-alone set of subjects?
Sarah Carter: That is interesting, because I have been involved in the delivery of certain PSHE modules, and particularly SRE but also some other life skills. Speaking for the Family Education Trust, we are not convinced that this is an academic function; this is a social function. Yes, perhaps they could be more incorporated in other subjects, which might be better use of the classroom time. Again, if certain pupils are excelling in maths, for example, you might be able to use that to bring in economic skills because they have that understanding. But the more personal aspects, I agree, can probably be introduced into different subjects, rather than making it an intense classroom activity, because actually the students are at different levels of understanding of those subjects.
Bill Esterson: So, a combination.
Q109 Chair: Graham, any thoughts on Bill’s question or mine?
Dr Ritchie: Sure. I think there are some aspects about a strong PSHE curriculum that require certain skills, like critical thinking, and I think it is very important that children and young people have a space and time at school to engage with those subjects and think through what it means to them in their daily lives. It would be very difficult to achieve that by embedding it within lots of different subjects across the entire school curriculum. I think having a dedicated space would be more beneficial.
Q110 Chair: If the dedicated space is pretty squeezed, and easily squeezed out, then I do not necessarily follow your logic. You might be able effectively to embed it in certain subjects—if you looked at the maths curriculum and you used that for financial information, or you built on the biological sexual area and built on to that human relationships as well. I do not know. There might be ways of doing it that would make it more likely that it was holistically taught and reinforced, rather than being these drop-down days that we hear a lot of criticism of.
Dr Ritchie: Sure. Well, there may be room for that as well, but I think that PSHE is taught in most schools already, but how is that time used, and is it being used as effectively as it possibly could be?
Q111 Chair: Is there sufficient time? Is it about the amount of time, or is it about the use of that time?
Dr Ritchie: It is a combination of the two. There needs to be time, but it needs to be used properly, and the way to use it properly is to ensure that the teachers who are responsible for using that teaching time are trained to use it in a way that is most effective for dealing with the things that children are interested in.
Q112 Bill Esterson: Is it a way of showing the relevance of academic subjects? Graham mentioned maths there—the overlap of financial education and numeracy in everyday life. The potential is huge. I mean, some teachers are very good at this, but I suspect it is a very hit or miss approach.
Dr Ritchie: Yes, I would imagine that is absolutely right, but within PSHE, I think you are right: you can bring to life some of the academic matter that comes up in other subjects in a more practical way—economics and budgeting and that type of thing. We know about physical and mental health, and the way in which that may be approached and PSHE can illuminate the other subjects, and the way in which that type of material is taught in schools.
Q113 Chair: Natasha, from the Curriculum for Life point of view, do you have any thoughts on the picture Graham has of a slightly separated thing as opposed to an embedded approach?
Natasha Browne: Yes, I think you need a bit of both. I think some schools can teach it really well, embedded in the curriculum. But for schools that are having to focus more on the academic side for students to pass exams, for them it may be more beneficial either to have a set subject or to dedicate so many days per year, so have a whole day based on drugs and alcohol. It really depends on the school and the students they have got at the school. I think our main aim was to do with personalising it to students at individual schools, so that is a really important issue.
Q114 Mr Ward: We had this debate when I was at university, about the permeation model for personal development skills and whether we should have a separate module for it or should do it in parts. We went for the distinct separate module, on the basis that what was the responsibility of everyone becomes the responsibility of nobody, but also because why should the particular skills that are required to do these sorts of subjects be in an English teacher, or a maths teacher, or someone doing a subject? Isn’t there the danger that, unless it is isolated and focused on, it just becomes something that the teachers would leave other people to do?
Chair: Does anyone disagree with that? Joe?
Joe Hayman: I am just conscious of creating a dichotomy between a discrete subject and something that is embedded as part of the whole school. English is a discrete subject, but it is reinforced in every other subject that is taught within the school, and you learn certain skills in English that you then reinforce in every other subject that you practice. There are distinct issues that we are covering in PSHE, such as issues relating to children’s mental health, that do require a safe space where those issues can be examined on their own. But that is not to say that that cannot be reinforced in the curriculum, and that PSHE should not be reinforcing the learning in other parts of the curriculum as well. I have no problem about it being reinforced in other parts of the curriculum, but it is a discrete subject.
Q115 Pat Glass: Good morning. We have had a number of definitions of PSHE: it is about a personal identity; it forms a bridge between education and public health by building resilience and well-being; it is information in preparation for a child’s future life. How should PSHE education be defined? Is it simply a list of subjects or topics, like sex, relationships, drugs, money and health, or should it be defined in some other way?
Joe Hayman: The agreed definition for PSHE—if you do not mind, I will read it, because it has been agreed meticulously between partners—is a planned programme of learning that equips pupils with the knowledge, understanding, skills and attributes they need to stay healthy and safe, and to prepare them for life and work in modern Britain. It is a curriculum subject that is seeking to achieve those objectives. What is interesting in that definition is that it does not list—
Pat Glass: Those topics.
Joe Hayman: A list of topics. There is simply too much to cover in the small amounts of time that schools have on the curriculum, and even if PSHE was expanded massively, there still would not be enough time to cover every single issue. We want to help children to develop key skills, key attributes and key thinking skills—critical thinking—that enable them to negotiate a range of different situations. Now, it is really important that they do learn some factual information, for example, in relation to the harms of drugs. There are some factual bits that need to be learnt. But we would hope that a programme of learning about drugs would also focus on developing a skill such as risk awareness, and how to manage a challenging situation, because the teacher is not going to be there in the moment when a child or a young person is first offered drugs, and we need them to develop those skills and those attributes to help them deal with those moments.
Sarah Carter: The danger lies in the fact that there are many things, as you were saying, like the economics side that we can integrate into classrooms but, as Joe was just saying, the school is not there the first time a young person is introduced to drugs, or the offer of a sexual experimentation comes up. That is where it becomes more of a social function, because parents and carers are there when that happens. It is a matter of defining what PSHE is, and whether it can be taught in an academic function or not, and some of the subjects are quite sensitive to parents. We take SRE, for example, and parents would like to have more involvement in even drug awareness and other social functions. If we were to define PSHE and say systematically, “This is what we will be teaching,” especially with regards to SRE, we would marginalise parents in a way, whereas they would like to be more involved in that. They would like to understand their own development of their child, and have some say in how their child is educated in that way.
Dr Ritchie: The definition outlined by Joe is perfectly reasonable. It should be a definition focused on the outcomes that we want to achieve for children and young people, rather than a prescriptive list of the things that we are worried about children and young people experiencing in their life—that we think that they should be educated on. If we look at the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in Article 29 it says that one of the goals of education is preparation for life in a responsible and free society, and that is quite a good starting point in thinking through the precise definition of PSHE.
Natasha Browne: PSHE should definitely include certain subjects, for example SRE, maybe political education, drugs and alcohol, and so on. Our main issue is that it should be descriptive, but still allow some leeway for schools. PSHE should be tailored to individual children, because it is about that child’s well-being. There needs to be flexibility for schools to tailor it to their students. There should be a basic curriculum that all children should have knowledge of, but if one school, for example, is dealing more with people struggling with body image or something, they should have room to focus more on that so that their child comes out well rounded.
Q116 Pat Glass: Whatever the definition, I think you said, Graham, that we should focus on the outcomes. What should those outcomes be? At the moment, we seem to measure teenage pregnancies and the rates of sexually transmitted diseases, but we do not necessarily link those back to the school and hold the school accountable for that. What should be the outcomes? Should we be looking at a school and judging them on the percentage of children who vote, the percentage who volunteer, those who have got a criminal record by the age of 18? How should we measure the impact and should we be holding the school to account for what happens to those young people?
Joe Hayman: With PSHE we have to be really careful not to overpromise. We are talking about massive social issues. Those issues that you are talking about are huge social issues. We need to be aware that the school is just one component of a wide range of factors that will impact upon children’s behaviour, most noticeably the family and their community. As to holding the schools to account for trends in teenage pregnancy or substance misuse, or whatever else, they are only one component part in such trends. I would prefer to see a system where there was monitoring of the quality of the provision in line with best practice principles, which have been established, and some kind of award that children and young people could gain as a result of having participated. That is probably the better model. I mean, we are trying to address teenage pregnancy; we are trying to address STIs; we are trying to address drugs. But these are wide social trends, and we have to be very careful about suggesting that PSHE on its own can make a defining difference.
Sarah Carter: I do not think that the outcomes of PSHE can be measured. After the 2011 riots, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister were quite clear that it was the responsibility of parents, and that teachers were not social workers or psychologists—they were not there to look after the emotional well-being of our children. The emphasis then was more on parents. It is their responsibility. Those outcomes, I do not think, should be the responsibility of the school.
Dr Ritchie: One thing that we probably can begin to measure in regard to PSHE is the way in which children and young people themselves feel about it. We know that whenever young people are asked about PSHE, they generally say that they want it, and they are quite clear about the types of things that they want to be addressed within that particular space in school. If you were to ask children and young people if they were satisfied with the type of PSHE that they received, that would be one way of looking at whether it is preparing them for life and achieving the types of things that they want.
Natasha Browne: I am going to slightly disagree with some of the things said. You probably can measure slightly whether PSHE is being taught well if teenage pregnancies in that general area drop, because maybe the students are being taught better. School is a really good place to teach PSHE properly, and I also think that there is a way to teach it properly and measure the outcomes we then base it on, for example access to mental health services or teenage pregnancy rates. The way it is going to be taught well is if teachers are trained properly in it, and therefore can give good education. If teachers have proper, adequate training and link to resources to help them teach it properly, then we can measure the outcomes of PSHE through access to other services.
Q117 Mr Raab: Can I move on from stuff like contraception and drugs awareness to the more values-based components of PSHE, and in particular to what extent you think that traits such as resilience, character and grit can meaningfully be, and should be, part of the domain of PSHE education? Natasha, why don’t you go first?
Natasha Browne: So, how do you measure?
Mr Raab: To what extent should teaching these more opaque or values-based traits, like resilience, character and grit, be the domain of PSHE education? I was coming to you first just because you have been through it, and you might have a view on it, but I did not want to put you on the spot.
Natasha Browne: You cannot really just teach, “This is how you are resilient.” There needs to be a method in place you can use as a tool to teach these things, so maybe mock interviews or those kind of tools.
Mr Raab: Overcoming nerves in a practical setting.
Natasha Browne: Yes, more like that practical aspect. Then, when someone goes to a job interview, it is not as intimidating, because they have already had experience of what it might be like within a school system.
Joe Hayman: This is absolutely the domain of PSHE education. We need to avoid a parade of topics and simple imparting of knowledge. We want children and young people to develop the skills and attributes that they need to thrive in the modern world, because we know that the world is changing, and we do not know what the job market is going to look like; we do not know what the world is going to look like for those children and young people. It is absolutely clear that those skills and attributes are vital for children and young people. There is good evidence, and it is in our submission, that those skills and attributes are not just innate. They can be taught as well as being caught, as it were, from the family.
Just in terms of the family and the community, it is really important to say that of course the family is the primary carer of the child, but the overwhelming majority of parents want their children to develop these skills, and they want it to be in partnership with the school.
Q118 Mr Raab: I thought Natasha’s point was interesting, which was that it was more of an applied approach with concrete examples, and I would have thought that would be part of maybe careers advice or that component, but in a very practical way. Where I am less sure is when we get to teaching them as values in their own right. Is there a single way to define resilience, character and grit, let alone instil them? Everyone may agree that resilience, character and grit are important values, but then have very different views, from the Victorian to the nanny-state view, as to what it involves. How do you maintain a consensus on that, and then at the same time make it meaningful for someone who has been through it, like Natasha?
Joe Hayman: Creating a consensus in the education community may not be possible on all of these kinds of issues. But there are some really good models and there is thinking going on out there at the moment. You have got think tanks working on it. There is a really good programme on resilience, the Penn Resiliency Program, which has been evidenced to be successful.
Q119 Mr Raab: Sorry, Joe, but how do you get over the inherent fact that this is values-centred and, therefore, for the reasons you gave, you are unlikely to get a consensus? How do you start teaching it beyond the practical application that Natasha has mentioned? I am sure we could come up with a few that would be good practical applications, although perhaps they should already be covered in other modules. Give me an example of how it would be taught or how it should be taught that is not happening already?
Joe Hayman: An example of what specifically, sorry?
Mr Raab: Grit, resilience and character.
Joe Hayman: Grit, resilience and character: what you would want to do is get into a situation where you are talking about situations that are happening in children’s lives, not in the lives of the specific children in the classroom. PSHE is taught as a plenary, with 30 children in the classroom, so it is not appropriate to talk about individual pupils’ issues in the classroom. You would want to ensure that, if a child had a particular issue, they got one-to-one help on that. You would want to create a scenario that was relevant to their lives. You could talk about a situation in relation to consent, for example, which is an issue that we have been exploring recently. You would create a scenario in which children and young people were given the opportunity to put themselves in the shoes of two fictional characters or characters in a film or DVD. CEOP, the Home Office, have produced films.
Q120 Chair: So, it is very much talk. It is didactic, rather than experiential. I mean, in the old days people would have said you teach grit by making them play murder-ball, or climb a mountain they did not want to on a cold day.
Craig Whittaker: Cross-country in the rain.
Chair: Or cross-country running—I do not know—or some other unpleasant activity that was regarded as somehow improving your character, not just making you miserable.
Joe Hayman: We are talking are curriculum subjects here, and it is really important —as I said earlier on—not to suggest that PSHE on its own can achieve all of these outcomes. It has to be part of a whole-school approach, and it has to be reinforced with the backing of parents and communities. But where I was getting to, in a long-winded way, was that once you have created that kind of scenario, you have the opportunity to put children and young people in that situation and get them to think in that situation, which is close to their reality but is not their reality, for the reasons that I talked about earlier on, and to talk about the different characters in the scenario. That gives you an opportunity to develop a skill or an attribute or a value like empathy, so you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes. That is a very practical way to think about a relationship.
Mr Raab: So, role-play of difficult situations?
Joe Hayman: Role-play of difficult situations. I mean, there is a variety of ways of playing that out, but that is one way of doing it.
Chair: Reading novels, perhaps.
Q121 Bill Esterson: That sounds theoretic, though. How practical is that as an approach? Employers, for ever it seems, have been saying young people are not ready for work: they do not have the problem-solving skills; they do not have the communication skills; they do not have the life skills. You mentioned the resilience programme and then moved on. Can you tell us how widespread and successful that is? Are there other examples like that already, where we should be sharing good practice to achieve some of these things?
Joe Hayman: The Penn Resiliency Program has been delivered to 1,100 teachers by the How to Thrive programme. The How to Thrive programme is also at the moment rolling out the biggest national evaluation of PSHE education, so they are taking evidence-based modules from around the world and delivering them in schools across the country, and evaluating their success. It is fairly widespread. For a PSHE programme, it is fairly widespread, and this is the fundamental challenge that we face: that teachers are not getting the initial training that they need and they are not getting the ongoing training that they need. It is not given sufficient space on the curriculum, and therefore it is very difficult to roll out a programme nationally, so that is what we are trying very hard to do at the moment.
Q122 Bill Esterson: You mentioned this point about role-playing, and I made the comment that that sounded theoretical, not practical, but how do you make it practical? Is work experience part of the mix here with PSHE?
Joe Hayman: Work experience is part of the mix. I would disagree that it is theoretical. It is getting very close to children’s realities, and that is why you need a skilled, trained teacher to do it properly. But of course there are going to be reinforcing experiences or very valuable experiences like work experience, which are absolutely vital.
Q123 Bill Esterson: It is just about how they use it outside the classroom.
Joe Hayman: Absolutely, but it is like anything. I go back to the English example. You learn English in the classroom and you apply it outside. Just because the application is outside does not mean that there cannot be valuable work done in the classroom.
Q124 Caroline Nokes: I just wanted to pick up on the point that you made about training for teachers, and is that not one of the fundamental problems? I do an enormous amount in the area of body image and self-confidence, and the message that I hear from a lot of young people, and there is empirical evidence to back it up, is that when taught badly it causes more harm than good. You mentioned the issue of training of teachers. Is not one of the fundamental problems that there is insufficient buy-in from the whole of the education establishment about how critical it is that those who are delivering PSHE have to do it brilliantly?
Natasha Browne: Yes. This is one of the reasons why we think that it should be statutory, because then schools would see that it is important, and therefore would have to teach it well, because of the value within the system. We also in our report have said we should have a lead teacher for PSHE who oversees this to ensure that other teachers are using the right resources to ensure that it is taught effectively. If it was instilled in the education system that PSHE is a vital part of children’s education, then hopefully over time in teacher training people would be taught that they have to learn something about it to ensure that young people are benefiting from it effectively.
Q125 Mr Raab: Sarah, I just wanted to ask you broadly the same question about the difficulty of defining resilience, character and grit in a way that commands consensus, and then distilling it in a practical way. What is your view?
Sarah Carter: I am also a foster carer. I look after young people who are at risk of exploitation, and resilience is a huge focus of the work that we do there. Again, resilience is very much a one-to-one thing, and Joe mentioned that if a young person is going through something, we need to make sure they are getting one-to-one support. Quite often in a classroom setting, some of these situations—a role-playing, for example—would be very uncomfortable because of what the young person is going through, whereas resilience is a one-to-one reflection of what is going on in life, a discussion on how to do this differently, and very much a nurturing thing. Again, our education system is not built for social workers and it is good to get other agencies in to build up things like self-esteem, but every single classroom and every single child is going to be different.
Q126 Mr Raab: In some of those scenarios—I was just thinking it through—whether drugs or consent, it is going to be very different, depending on the child.
Sarah Carter: Yes, every child.
Q127 Mr Raab: Is that your experience or am I wrong about that?
Sarah Carter: Absolutely. Even if you teach SRE to a classroom of year 11 students, which I have done, half of the classroom are mortified and the other half you are too late for. When it comes to self-esteem, exploitation or drug awareness, every child is going to be on a completely different level. I am not against PSHE—I have taught it and I fully support it—but the danger comes in when it is a prescriptive classroom-wide approach and one size fits all.
Q128 Mr Raab: So, what would you have instead? Teacher mentoring? Or are you saying that this is something that parents have got to be more involved in?
Sarah Carter: To have parents more involved would be ideal—for every school to be able to liaise with parents. They could not just inform parents of the material that is being taught but liaise with them and get their buy-in as to their understanding of the maturity of their child. Parents could then support that in the home environment, working with the young person.
Q129 Mr Ward: We know that there is a difference between disadvantaged families and more affluent middle-class families in terms of support. Just for example, I was in the park with the grandkiddy on Sunday morning, and there were five parents there. Four of them were on Twitter—were sending messages. They were not looking at the kids at all while they were there. When I wanted a pair of football boots in September, I was told to wait until Christmas, and we had to wait until Christmas, because you were not getting them before. There is also the issue of if the grandkiddy breaks a toy, we say, “Never mind. We will get a new one.” Before you came, I was saying that it is much more difficult to be a young person now than it was when I was young, but is there any evidence that our young people are struggling with life in modern society?
Chair: A small question for you, Graham.
Dr Ritchie: I will have a go at that. I will try to narrow it down, and answer some of your question. There are aspects of modern life that perhaps some of us when we were younger did not necessarily experience. One piece of work that the OCC has undertaken is on the impact of pornography on children and young people. We find that children and young people are increasingly exposed to pornography, at increasingly young ages. We know that it does affect them.
Q130 Chair: What age are we talking about?
Dr Ritchie: We did research in secondary schools, but I know that large‑scale quantitative studies done through Sonia Livingstone at the London School of Economics have found that young people from the age of nine were accessing pornography—not necessarily in large numbers, but we know that they have the potential to do so. Young people increasingly have smartphones; they have laptops; they are in their bedrooms. They are accessing the internet unsupervised.
There is the potential there to access pornography and we know that it affects them. It affects young women and their body image—self‑objectification. It affects young men and the expectations that they have of sexual partners. Therefore, it is incumbent on schools to address that issue and talk with young people about it as part of PSHE.
Joe mentioned consent earlier, and the OCC has also done some work on that. We found that young people are finding it quite difficult to understand consent. It is often understood as a straightforward yes‑or‑no issue, a black‑and‑white issue, when it is much more complex than that, and there is a real failure to understand some of the nuances and the role of contextual factors such as coercion, vulnerability and fear in someone’s ability to give consent or, indeed, withhold it.
These are quite difficult issues. Young people do live complex lives, and it is very important, going back to the point about trained teachers, that teachers who are responsible for delivering PSHE understand some of these issues and can relate to the young people.
Q131 Mr Raab: Ofsted currently has a duty to inspect pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. Joe, from your point of view and given your work, is it adequate? Is it right? Is it well tailored?
Joe Hayman: Do you mean the Ofsted inspections or the provision itself?
Mr Raab: I mean the Ofsted inspections.
Joe Hayman: This goes back to the point Caroline was making earlier on about buy‑in within schools. There is buy‑in. We have four of the biggest teaching unions saying that they want statutory PSHE. The NUT surveyed their members and 88% of their members said that PSHE should be made a statutory subject. What has been happening in the past few years is that there has been almost a disincentive to focus on PSHE and a sense that other areas are more important.
The SMSC judgment—spiritual, moral, social, cultural—is an important component. It does not cover physical and emotional health, which are really important. Just going to David’s point, there are some real concerns about pupils’ mental health at the moment. We are seeing some good trends in relation to smoking and alcohol misuse, but we are seeing really worrying trends in relation to pupils’ mental health.
There needs to be a strengthening of the Ofsted framework, and we are in a good position, because Ofsted is now looking at this hard. They have proposed a fifth judgment, which would cover some of these elements. There is a bit of work to be done on the wording of that, and I will contribute to the consultation process, but that will bring much-needed balance to the monitoring of schools.
Q132 Mr Raab: Finally, what do you think of the whole concept of schools providing spiritual, moral, social and cultural development? Does that have a role to play or is it, with our diverse, pluralistic society, just too difficult to distil down into something that teachers could be realistically asked to do?
Sarah Carter: It is difficult, because every individual has their own set of morals. While we would like to think that something that is moral for us personally would be moral for everyone in this room, it is not always the case. When you are teaching something like morals and values, you are always going to communicate from your own point of view. Again, it is not fair for teachers to have to be in that position when they are dealing on that level. However, the law would be a fantastic thing to teach them.
In PSHE when I was at school, we did a lot of the legal aspects such as in health or the legal age of smoking. When it comes down to SRE, what is taught is not always what is lawful. Again, if a teacher has a moral point of view or standpoint that young people should be sexually active from the age of 13, that is what they are going to communicate to their classroom, whereas that is a value that parents may not share. They may like their young people to wait before they are sexually active. Again, it is not the responsibility of the teacher to try to communicate morals and values.
Q133 Chair: You said, “What is taught is not always what is lawful.” Could you expand on that?
Sarah Carter: Yes. The Department for Education recently issued some supplementary guidance to schools on SRE, and there were quite a lot of recommended resources within there. Take Brook’s Traffic Light Tool, for instance. It states consensual sexual activity from the age of 13 is normal behaviour and development, whereas the law states that the young people should wait until they are 16 at least, never mind if they are ready or not. That, however, is unlawful behaviour. Quite often, what is taught in SRE is not always lawful.
Joe Hayman: The guidance you are referring to was not from the Department for Education; it was from the PSHE Association.
Sarah Carter: I am sorry, yes. The Department for Education backed it.
Chair: Sarah was clear that it came out from the Department with a list of resources that could be used. It was not endorsed, but it was provided as a link, which suggests a level of endorsement.
Joe Hayman: The Department for Education provided a link to the resource, which we and Brook and the Sex Education Forum produced. This really goes to the heart of what we are trying to do. Sarah said that teachers might have values about children being sexually active at 13. I do not know any teachers who do; I do not think any of our members feel that way. The only challenge about dealing with these subjects—this is why we need really well- trained teachers—is that we have to deal with children’s realities.
Q134 Chair: Joe, you said, “This really goes to the heart of what we are trying to do.” Your critics would say, “Yes, exactly. They want to send out messages that 13‑year‑olds having sex together is somehow okay and part of growing up and to be accepted.” They would say, “It is not that it does not happen, but that in any way to suggest that this is normal or to send out a message that it is not wrong, harmful and dangerous is in fact almost to collude with something that we know is damaging to young people.” That would be what your critics would say.
Joe Hayman: But that is not what I was saying. I was saying that dictatorial, from‑the‑front lessons on what one should and should not do are less likely to have an impact. We have to start from where children are: their reality. Now, there is no one in our community who feels that we should be trying to sexualise children or any of those kinds of things. What we want is for children to develop healthy and safe relationships. It is really important that teachers are provided with the necessary training to do that.
If you look at all of the resources that the PSHE Association has produced, we are very clear about teaching about the law.
Q135 Chair: Sarah specifically mentions the references in the resource that you helped produce around 13‑year‑olds having sex, and she believes it is unlawful.
Joe Hayman: It is unlawful; that is very clear.
Q136 Chair: To read the guidance, you would not think so, because it talks about its being a normal part of growing up.
Joe Hayman: It is difficult for me to be accountable for every single piece of guidance.
Q137 Chair: It is guidance that you signed off on.
Joe Hayman: It is guidance that is linked in a document that has 40 different links within it. I do not have the document in front of me, so it is very difficult for me to do that. I would be very happy to write to you specifically on that issue, but I do not have the document in front of me, so it is difficult to do that. There are 40‑plus documents that are linked in that SRE advice document.
Q138 Chair: I thought this was Brook‑led. Were you not part of that?
Joe Hayman: This is not in the guidance itself that Sarah is referring to. This is a link to one of 40 different documents that are linked in that guidance.
Q139 Chair: Sarah, which document is it in which this unlawful 13‑year‑old stuff sits?
Sarah Carter: We had a look at quite a lot of the resources that are recommended in the supplementary guidance. Specifically, the Brook Traffic Light Tool talks about normal sexual development. It does highlight some things that are scarier for young people, but it is certainly in the green light section for them to be sexually active from the age of 13.
Q140 Chair: Shall we move on? Do you have anything further?
Joe Hayman: Could I ask for the opportunity to write to you on that specific point?
Chair: Please do write.
Joe Hayman: It is very difficult with all these resources.
Dr Ritchie: I want to widen the conversation out to relationships and sex education. At the OCC, we have said and recommended previously that instead of talking about sex and relationships education, we should talk about relationships and sex education—and put the relationships bit first, because that is really the thrust of it.
On the issue of 13‑year‑olds having sex, one reason why we should be concerned about it is child sexual exploitation. We have all seen what has happened in Rotherham and the Alexis Jay report. We are aware of the report from Greater Manchester last week from Ann Coffey. The OCC has conducted a two‑year inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups. It was very clear from that that one of the models of child sexual exploitation is where offenders will groom young people and children to believe that they are in a consensual sexual relationship, that they are effectively their boyfriend, and they will then exploit them.
In order to ensure that young people have the skills and the tools to recognise the warning signs—to recognise when they may be being exploited and when they can give consent and when they cannot—we need to deal with it in schools and we need to deal with that as part of—
Q141 Chair: Do you know this Traffic Light Tool?
Dr Ritchie: I am not familiar with it.
Chair: You cannot comment on that.
Q142 Caroline Nokes: Moving off sex and relationship education specifically—I am going to go to Natasha first; I am sorry if it is putting you on the spot—we see some wonderful interventions from organisations such as the Girl Guides, which are young‑person led and indicate what they want to see included in PSHE. What are your views on how much young people are involved in shaping it?
Natasha Browne: Obviously, PSHE is centred on the child. If there are things these students feel they need to be taught, schools should be catering to the individual needs of those children, which is why I said earlier about how there should be guidelines on what things do definitely need to be taught, but then leeway for individual students, because of the fact that, obviously, PSHE is intrinsic to that child and their development.
Q143 Caroline Nokes: How much is that actually happening? It is not “should it be”, but “is it”.
Natasha Browne: A lot of young people would say they do not remember much about what was taught generally in PSHE. Therefore, it is probably not happening all that much. Some schools are doing it very well—maybe through student councils and student forums, even anonymous surveys or something to say what they think should be taught. In some schools it probably is taught well. Maybe we should take from those schools where it is taught well the methods they use to ensure young people’s involvement and broaden that out to the general society.
Q144 Caroline Nokes: Joe, turning to you, can I ask how you think the views of young people are being incorporated, particularly with the work set‑up on the new expert group?
Joe Hayman: It is really important to ensure that pupils are closely involved in the development of the programme. Sarah talked earlier on about a divided class, and it is really vital that PSHE teachers are trained both in engaging with pupils in advance of a lesson and thinking about what they want to be covered, but also meeting the needs of the variety of learners who are within the classroom—and there will be a variety.
It comes back to the critical point about training for teachers. It is an important subject, but it is not always easy to teach, particularly because you do have a variety of backgrounds the children are bringing into the classroom. That is why it is absolutely crucial that teachers are adequately trained. You asked about this earlier on. There is virtually no initial teacher training in PSHE at the moment; almost none. You have teachers going into classrooms without having had, sometimes, even basic training in the subject.
That is a really invidious position for the teacher to be in and it is a really negative position for the young people as well. The UK Youth Parliament’s campaign for “A Curriculum for Life” in part reflects the fact that young people think this is really important, but they have not yet had a good enough experience of the subject across the piece.
Q145 Chair: We are going to come back to that. Caroline asked about the expert group. I do not know whether we should just draw this inquiry to a close now and not issue a report, because there is an expert group chaired by you looking into it officially, set up by the Government. Is that the job done or should we not have such high hopes of your expert group?
Joe Hayman: One of the key things that children would learn in PSHE and citizenship is that you have experts and then you have representatives, who are elected to make decisions and make recommendations. That is a really important thing for children to learn. I hope we will be able to publish a draft of the report that you will be able to consider.
It is really important to note that this issue is a systemic issue. PSHE is a subject that the Department for Education mentions in the national curriculum preamble. It says, “All schools should be expected to teach PSHE.” However, there is almost no initial teacher training in the subject.
Chair: You have said that. I want to focus on this expert group for a bit.
Joe Hayman: What I am trying to say is that an expert group, valuable as it is and strong as our recommendations will be, does not address that fundamental systemic issue, which is that there are expectations of the subject—parents overwhelmingly want it; children and young people overwhelmingly want it; teachers overwhelmingly want it—and there is no training in the subject and, in some cases, there is insufficient time given to the subjects on the curriculum.
We will make recommendations—I will share them with you; I will share them with the Department for Education—but we need system change.
Q146 Caroline Nokes: Can I go back to your expert group and how, specifically, you are incorporating the views of young people, their parents, Government and teachers? You have indicated there might be a conflict between each of them. How are you managing to incorporate all of them?
Joe Hayman: There is no conflict between any of those groups. We have parents, teachers and young people overwhelmingly saying that this is a subject that they want. It is worth talking about consensus for the subjects.
Q147 Caroline Nokes: Are you including young people’s views in your expert group?
Joe Hayman: We have had an initial stage of three meetings, and we are producing an initial report. The second phase of our work will be involving young people, but the initial stage has been involving experts working at local‑authority and school level. They are working with young people, but the group itself has not engaged directly with them.
Q148 Caroline Nokes: Whose views should take priority? From what you have just said, it is not the young people’s views that take priority. They come in at phase two.
Joe Hayman: That is not what I was saying, and if I gave that impression I would like to correct that. What I am saying is that we have got 15 experts who are experts in engaging with children and young people. They are bringing their experience of working with local authorities, teachers and young people across the country. They will bring the views of young people to that forum.
However, I need to be really clear about this: this is a small group with relatively little funding.
Q149 Chair: Is it 15? The list I have has 17 names on it, and it has just shrunk to 15.
Joe Hayman: I am not familiar with the precise number. I apologise.
Chair: I am sorry.
Joe Hayman: There are 17 people on it. It is a group that has a very limited budget and very limited scope. I would be very disappointed if any impression was given that I thought this group, valuable though those recommendations will be, will be able to address the fundamental issue.
The fundamental issue is that teachers have not had adequate training to engage with their individual pupils in classrooms across the country, and that is what we need to change, because PSHE needs to be tailored to the needs of the individual pupils. We can talk and we will talk with young people’s representatives.
Chair: You have made that clear, Joe.
Caroline Nokes: I do not have any further questions.
Q150 Chair: We have quite limited time, but this is the PSHE expert group. It has 17 names on it, and not one of them is from health. I do not understand. It has tonnes of local authorities, a few schools and Ofsted. Why is health not on an expert group on PSHE? You could equally well ask why there is no one from the world of finance or money in an expert group on that. You are the chair of it, so why does it have the make-up it has?
Joe Hayman: We have a PSHE Strategic Partners Group, which operates at a national level and which gives opportunities for partners who are working in areas like health to give their views. The Department of Health, Public Health England and others are on that group. What we did not want to do was replicate that group, because we already have a group that brings together all those partners. What I wanted to do was bring together expert practitioners who are working with children and young people across the country and talk to them, because the remit of the group was to identify the resources and the training that were needed by teachers across the country.
We felt that expert teachers and local authority leads would be the best people to identify that. There is a separate group that addresses all the different health and economic areas. The Personal Finance Education Group is on that strategic partnership.
Q151 Craig Whittaker: The Children’s Commissioner says that porn is everywhere. How should SRE lessons take account of young people’s access to pornography?
Dr Ritchie: That is absolutely right; that was the title of our report into pornography. We commissioned that from the University of Middlesex as part of our inquiry into child sexual exploitation in groups and gangs. A number of the professionals we spoke with during that inquiry raised the issue of pornography. They said that, in their view, it was affecting children and young people and their attitudes towards relationships and, indeed, towards each other.
We commissioned a rapid evidence assessment, which looked at a vast number of published articles on pornography and its impact on children and young people, and we reached a number of conclusions based on the evidence therein. It did find that pornography has an impact on children and young people. It does affect them. It affects young women in particular and their body image and self-objectification.
Chair: How should the lessons take that into account?
Dr Ritchie: To get to that particular point, how should that be addressed in education? It needs to be done in an age‑appropriate manner, first of all, so we need to think very carefully about the views of children and young people who are in the class and how they would like that issue to be addressed. It also needs to be done sensitively. It can be done in the context of internet safety more broadly, safe use of social media: Facebook, Twitter and the like. By focusing on that issue, you can bring in messages in regard to pornography and the way in which children and young people should critically think about some of the things they may be seeing when they look at it.
Sarah Carter: I recently did an interview with Radio 4. They had put together a compilation of interviews with young people and their views on pornography. They are very aware of how vulnerable they are and how easy it is for them to access. Parents celebrated the fact that we will teaching them about pornography and warning them, but, again, this kind of education needs to be done in collaboration with parents about what is going to be taught to their child and educating parents on how to protect their children.
Again, I am probably going to be throwing another bomb into this conversation here, but the supplementary guidance listed certain materials that were taking groups of young people and asking them to recreate ethical porn in the style of cartoon characters. Again, the young people I work with would find it quite horrific to work in a classroom setting and discuss what is ethical, what is diverse, how to interpret pornography, and what is real and what is fantasy. Parents would not find that appropriate; as a carer, I certainly would not.
Joe Hayman: It is really important that every school’s sex and relationships education policy and programme should be developed in collaboration with the governors and informed by the views of parents. That is policy; that is Government guidance; that is absolutely what should happen.
Our view and the view of parents across the country whom we have surveyed is that we want high‑quality sex and relationships education, because parents are worried about these kinds of issues and they want children to be prepared to deal with them. It is very difficult to talk about all of the range of resources that are set out, but one of the key things coming out of the evidence of the Children’s Commissioner and others is that pornography is having an impact on young people’s perceptions of what a healthy relationship and an unhealthy relationship is.
Q152 Chair: What should happen in the classroom as a result? What does it looks like? Saying that pornography often has pernicious effects and it is overwhelming and it is everywhere is one thing; how would you incorporate that into lessons, given the level of training that exists right now? How do you do that? What are the messages? What does it look like? That is what Craig is after.
Joe Hayman: Training is a very important issue, because we know that some schools are not dealing with these issues because the teachers have not had the adequate training. It is a real opportunity for young people to think about what is real and what is not, because pornography, as I understand it, contains a lot of depictions of non‑consensual sex. Consent is never depicted in sexual activity; unrealistic body images are depicted.
Craig Whittaker: Going back to the question, how does that bear out in a lesson?
Chair: Very briefly, Joe, or not at all.
Joe Hayman: You would do something that looked at some of the assumptions that underlie pornography. You do not need to show pornography in the lesson, but you would look at some of the assumptions that underlie it and you would give an opportunity for the young people to interrogate those and think, “Are those really realistic?” That is what you want to do.
Natasha Browne: I would slightly go with that. I did an event about pornography and the effects on young people. They had this video that showed the assumptions about things that people seem to get out of watching porn and then showed the difference between this fantasy world and the reality. They show that, therefore, from the facts, what is normal is not what is depicted there. You need to show the average normal person kind of thing and that it is not in any way relatable to this free access.
Q153 Craig Whittaker: Let me just ask you a question, then. We know that parents want this type of education in schools. We know it needs to be high quality. We have heard the words “collaboration”, “age‑appropriate” and all those types of things. However, in my schools in the Calder Valley, for example, we had an issue locally with chlamydia. People wanted to teach about it in our high schools. The outrage from parents in some areas was so fierce that it never happened. How do you get a consistent approach with parents? My idea of what is appropriate is probably totally different from what others’ ideas are. How do you get that consistent approach to achieve the things that you have highlighted as important?
Chair: Natasha, do you have any brief, succinct remarks on that?
Natasha Browne: If you said that parents are maybe disagreeing with the teaching of something but the school thinks it is important, then maybe the school should also be informing the parents about why this issue is so intrinsically important to teach at this set time. I do not know if it could be a letter to the parents or a meeting with the parents at the school to explain why this is important and why this should be taught.
Craig Whittaker: Good luck with that.
Chair: Do we have one more answer to that?
Joe Hayman: 88% of parents we surveyed with YouGov support high‑quality sex and relationships education. It is really important that those parents get the support that they need for their children in partnership with the school and the community. It is really important that there are safeguards in place for those parents who feel the teaching is not what they want. Parents should be engaged in the process of putting an SRE policy together, and a safeguard that does exist is the right of withdrawal for those parents who are really uncomfortable in relation to that.
Q154 Chair: Do you support the right to opt out?
Joe Hayman: It is very troublesome; it is very difficult for our sector. However, we have to be realistic that there are some parents who want to opt out.
Chair: Was that a “yes” or a “no”?
Joe Hayman: It is an “it is very difficult”.
Chair: A career in politics awaits you.
Joe Hayman: Can I finish my sentence? It is very challenging for our sector, but the big issue here is that we have 40% of schools not delivering this education to a high enough standard.
Q155 Chair: I am sorry, Joe. We had a very specific question. There is an opt‑out. We could either recommend that we get rid of it or we could recommend that we keep it. We would quite like to know what your view is, but you are not helping us.
Joe Hayman: I am just saying that this is holding it back. If the right of withdrawal enables the 40% of children who are currently not getting high-quality PSHE to get it, that is a price worth paying.
Q156 Alex Cunningham: I would like to know something as well. The suggestion is that there should be a statutory right for children to have the whole range of PSHE and sex and relationships education. In that case, if they have a statutory right to it, should parents really have a counter‑right to stop them having their statutory right?
Caroline Nokes: You would not let them opt out of maths, would you?
Alex Cunningham: Should they opt out? Should parents have the right to withdraw their children? It is yes or no.
Sarah Carter: Absolutely, yes.
Dr Ritchie: I can talk about children’s rights. I would say that under Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have a right to express their view on matters that affect them, and that view has to be taken seriously.
Q157 Alex Cunningham: Which one trumps?
Dr Ritchie: For us, we would say it is the right of children. They say that they want it, and therefore they should have it.
Q158 Caroline Nokes: What if they say they do not want it? Should a child then be allowed to opt out?
Dr Ritchie: At that stage we would have to have a very difficult conversation about exactly what level of PSHE is absolutely necessary.
Q159 Mr Raab: Could they opt out of maths, as well, or English or anything else?
Dr Ritchie: You are absolutely right to say that Article 12 does not mean that children get their way in absolutely every matter that affects them. They do not get to have the final decision, but we do need to take their views very seriously.
Q160 Chair: That is a “no” to whether parents should continue to have the right.
Dr Ritchie: That is a very challenging question.
Chair: Yes. That is what we are here for. Asking the patsy questions would be a waste of time, would it not? What is the point of meeting if we are not going to get to the difficult ones?
Dr Ritchie: I would say the rights of children should take precedence.
Joe Hayman: Can I—
Chair: No.
Sarah Carter: Parents should be able to maintain the right to withdraw. They do have access to the maths curriculum and the English curriculum. If there is something that deeply upsets them and they think their child is not emotionally ready for it, perhaps they can discuss with the teacher a different way of educating him or her. However, with regards to sex education, every child matures differently, so the parents should be able to say, “I would like to be able to educate my own child in this situation.”
Natasha Browne: I do not know, because on one side children should all have a basic understanding of all of the issues, but I can understand some conflicts if parents intrinsically have those values. The child’s rights should overcome, because it is about their education.
Q161 Chair: Without giving him a right of reply, I would say Joe’s idealism through so many years of fighting for PSHE has seen him take the pragmatic view that, if it helps get better PSHE by allowing some to have an opt-out, rarely used, it is a price worth paying. However, I am probably putting words in your mouth.
Joe Hayman: Yes. Essentially, what you are saying is what I am saying, but—
Chair: Excellent.
Q162 Craig Whittaker: Sarah, I need to challenge this. The Family Education Trust says that most of the components of PSHE are the primary responsibility of the parents. You have said here today that outcomes should not be the responsibility of the school—or a variation on that. But the Family Education Trust also says that schools should be accountable to parents.
Sarah Carter: That is right.
Q163 Craig Whittaker: How does all that work in practice?
Sarah Carter: Quite often, we find that a lot of parents write to us and we are their go‑to body when people are upset with what is being taught in their classes, specifically with SRE, to be fair. Quite often, especially in primary school education, the parents have been absolutely mortified that their children are coming home wanting to get involved in sexual acts because they have been told it is exciting and wonderful. Parents have not been consulted. Parents may have been informed; they may have been invited to meetings to say, “This is what we are going to do,” but they have not been consulted. If schools are accountable to parents, they will get parents’ buy‑in.
Q164 Craig Whittaker: How do you get accountability and not responsibility?
Sarah Carter: Parents have the responsibility for educating their children.
Q165 Craig Whittaker: But the schools are accountable. Is that what you are saying?
Sarah Carter: Yes. Schools are working with the parents, but ultimately the parents hold the responsibility.
Q166 Craig Whittaker: That makes the schools not accountable at all, then. If they do not have the responsibility, how can you hold them to account for it?
Sarah Carter: They have responsibility for the overall education of the child, but in the area of PSHE they should be working with parents, because it is not their responsibility.
Q167 Craig Whittaker: Okay. They are not accountable, then.
Chair: We have very limited time. You have a couple of quick questions, David.
Q168 Mr Ward: I had a question on statutory responsibility, but we are now very clear on the different views on that. One of the arguments against the statutory responsibility is the parents saying, “It is not my problem now. It is theirs now.” Would that be, in your view, a criticism or an argument against the statutory responsibility of schools to provide this?
Dr Ritchie: Schools and parents need to have that conversation about the content of PSHE. There are further questions to ask about the optimal relationship between teachers and parents and the delivery of some of these messages. That is a conversation that needs to be had.
Q169 Mr Ward: Joe, earlier on you were talking about the different backgrounds that people come from. I wondered how that could be incorporated into different forms of provision, depending on what the background and context is.
Joe Hayman: It is really important that there is not a one‑size‑fits‑all PSHE curriculum. It has to be negotiated with individual head teachers. It has to be part of their own curriculum and developed in association with governors. Let us not treat schools and parents as separate: the governing body represents parents and community leaders. That is the central focus for the discussion or the negotiation.
Chair: Some academies do not have a governing body.
Joe Hayman: In which case, there should be other forms of engagement with the parents.
Natasha Browne: Some parents probably do not teach this anyway and schools are not being forced to teach it. Therefore, some children are getting no benefit from this. By making it statutory, where all teachers have to teach it, all students will therefore have access to it. If the parents then decide it is not their responsibility, the child may not benefit as much but, because it is statutory in schools, they are getting some access to it, which is better than no access at all.
Q170 Mr Ward: Graham, you made an argument for RSE as opposed to SRE. For the record, could you add to your comments on that?
Dr Ritchie: I would just say that throughout all of the work we have done, a lot of the content around relationships and sex education is on the relationship side of things. It is about attitudes towards other people; it is about respect. It is about healthy relationships, rather than just sex. From speaking with children and young people, and looking at some of the reports on child sexual exploitation that have been published recently, the conclusion is that young people say that too often relationships and sex education focuses on the mechanics of sex, rather than the relationships part. That is often the neglected bit and that is the most important part.
Q171 Chair: Very briefly, yes or no, does Graham have a point on this—that the terminology of “relationships” gives precedence to the more important part? It might make it more politically deliverable as well—who knows?
Natasha Browne: Yes.
Joe Hayman: Yes, absolutely, Graham
Sarah Carter: I would go so far as to say teach it in the context of marriage to enable young people to aspire to having real relationships, rather than casual ones.
Q172 Alex Cunningham: Schools under the new regime of academies have all of these tremendous freedoms. They can design their own curriculum. Does the right to PSHE education compromise that school autonomy?
Dr Ritchie: I would say that all children and young people have the rights that I mentioned earlier. They all have the right to express their view, and when they have done, they have said they want PSHE. Other rights that are relevant to this discussion include Article 34 and protection from sexual abuse and exploitation, Article 17 on access to information, especially that which affects their spiritual, social and moral well-being and their physical and mental health. These are universal rights that all children have.
Q173 Alex Cunningham: Would you dictate to academies, as everybody else, that there should be particular content?
Dr Ritchie: I would say that academies do not need to be dictated to, but they should respect the rights that young people have.
Q174 Alex Cunningham: Some schools may have a particular approach to PSHE and, particularly, to relationships and sex education because of their type or because of the people running those schools. How do we ensure that all children in different school environments have the right to the same balanced teaching and that certain topics are not glossed over because somebody finds it uncomfortable or it is against their way of doing things to teach them?
Natasha Browne: If a teacher, for example, or a school feels they do not have adequate training in a certain topic, this is where we feel they should be drafting in experts in that field to ensure that they are taught with the background knowledge in that specific field.
Alex Cunningham: I agree with you totally there, but some schools may choose not to tackle a particular subject or at least gloss over the subject rather than deal with the issues.
Natasha Browne: If it is statutory, they cannot ignore it.
Joe Hayman: Statutory status means that these issues cannot be ignored. You cannot cover every single topic, but you can equip children with the skills and attributes they need to negotiate a range of situations. But you need proper time on the curriculum; you need teacher training. This is a system issue that needs to be addressed, and that is why we want statutory status: not as an end in itself but to ensure that every class is taught by a trained teacher with adequate curriculum time.
Q175 Alex Cunningham: However, there are particular types of schools that may choose not to comply. Even if it were statutory, they might balk at that or just gloss over it rather than deal with the issues.
Joe Hayman: I would say that 88% of teachers, according to an NUT survey, said they wanted PSHE to be statutory. That says to me that they want to teach it, but they are not getting any incentives. They are getting disincentives at the moment.
Q176 Alex Cunningham: It is the 12% that worry me. The role of parents in delivering this sort of education is very important but, of course, it varies considerably. Some people have nothing at all to do with it; others think they know best. How can we support parents and prepare them for what Jimmy is going to come home and say after he has had his lesson at 9 o’clock that morning?
Sarah Carter: There are materials out there to help parents to talk to their children about these issues. I do understand that some parents might not be willing to do that, and that is a separate issue. Schools should not always pick up where parents leave off.
Q177 Alex Cunningham: It is more likely to be the other way around, though, isn’t it?
Sarah Carter: It is true, but the schools should not be compensating for bad parenting. There are other ways we can resource parents in order to equip them for, like you say, when their child comes home and wants to have these conversations. However, there is a separate conversation outside of statutory PSHE if parents failing their children.
Q178 Alex Cunningham: If there is a statutory right for the school to deliver it to the child, surely we should be doing more to help parents be prepared for what comes home.
Sarah Carter: I agree. We should be preparing parents.
Q179 Alex Cunningham: What can we do?
Dr Ritchie: If I can comment on that, I would say that the content of PSHE lessons should be the product of a dialogue between parents, young people and teachers themselves. Throughout that dialogue, it should be possible for parents to feel confident in what is being taught to their children and, as a result of that, they should have some of that confidence.
I would also point out that some of the most vulnerable young people in England do not live with their parents. They are in the looked‑after system, and some of them will be in residential care. Those young people may be particularly vulnerable to some of the issues that are dealt with through PSHE, whether that is sexual exploitation, recognising abuse or substance misuse. It is very important that schools are playing a very direct role in the lives of those young people.
Q180 Chair: Can you try to bring this to an end?
Q181 Alex Cunningham: Because of the issue of kids in care— looked‑after children—is there something that local authorities need to address beyond the school environment to make sure that those particular children get the necessary support?
Dr Ritchie: Yes, absolutely.
Q182 Alex Cunningham: What can we do? What should the house parents, or whatever you call the people working with them, be doing? What training do they require in order to do a better job in supporting children coming home following their PSHE lesson?
Dr Ritchie: I would say they should have the same type of training that teachers should receive. There are a number of resources out there. Local authorities should be made aware of them, and work with them and then work with the young people who are in their care to ensure they are equipped with the knowledge as well.
Q183 Craig Whittaker: I wanted to ask for a quick reply. Why does everybody think something being statutory will make it happen? We have lots and lots of statutory things; that is what we do in this place. Religious education, for example, is statutory, but how it is delivered is an absolute postcode lottery. Why should it be statutory?
Natasha Browne: Because if it is statutory, it is more likely to be taught better.
Craig Whittaker: There is no evidence, I might add, that it is going to be taught better if it is statutory.
Natasha Browne: If it is statutory, schools are more likely to see the importance of it. They are more likely to try to find better training and, therefore, children are more likely to have access to it.
Q184 Craig Whittaker: Does anybody have a different view?
Joe Hayman: Can I—
Craig Whittaker: Is it a different view?
Joe Hayman: To reinforce the point about teacher training, at the moment there is almost no initial teacher training on PSHE.
Q185 Chair: So, why isn’t that the recommendation? Craig’s point is: why go for the statutory stuff in some naïve belief that it will magically change things?
Craig Whittaker: Religious education is statutory and it is specialist, but it still does not happen.
Joe Hayman: Can I answer your question, Mr Stuart? We have moved to a system now in which initial teacher training providers can set their own curriculum, and as long as that system remains in place we have to change the demand from the schools. That is what this measure is intended to do.
Sarah Carter: Our recommendation is that it is not made statutory, simply because we want to avoid the prescriptive approach.
Dr Ritchie: I would say that it can be statutory and avoid a prescriptive approach. By making PSHE statutory, you are not necessarily prescribing a range of topics that need to be taught within those lessons. I would say that those topics are not one‑size‑fits‑all. They should be decided based on a conversation with children and young people themselves and, indeed, their parents.
Chair: Thank you all very much indeed. If you have any further thoughts, particularly around recommendations you would like to see in our final report, please do be in touch if you have not already made those clear in written or oral evidence. Thank you very much indeed. We can switch as quickly as possible to the next panel.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Crispin Drummond, Explore—Students Exploring Marriage, Michael Mercieca, Chief Executive, Young Enterprise, Dr Ann Hoskins, Deputy Director Health and Wellbeing, Public Health England, and Michael O’Toole, Chief Executive, Mentor, gave evidence.
Q186 Chair: Good morning and welcome. Last week, a Home Office report noted that new psychoactive substances, or “legal highs” as they are called, present a new challenge to our ability to prevent drug use through education. Many of these products are presented as legal, but may be more harmful than the substances that are currently deemed illegal. How will Government guidance ever keep pace with changes in things like that? Will it always be out of date as soon as it is published? How does guidance keep up with the changing world of drugs and in other areas?
Michael O’Toole: It must attempt to. The resources that are available to support the teaching of drug and alcohol prevention and resilience within PSHE can support teachers, especially teachers founded upon better initial teacher training and ongoing personal development training, and they can attempt to keep up, but I recognise that is a challenge.
My organisation is the leading UK expert in drug education around prevention, and we see the challenge that sits within your question and we put plenty of effort into keeping on top of those developments and that changing environment. We also particularly support the evidence base around understanding what works in terms of education and prevention in that changing environment. We would say that creating resources that can help teachers, in real time, to cope with that challenge is one part of the solution.
Dr Hoskins: For me, there are two areas. There is the actual understanding of what is happening, i.e. the surveys asking young people what substances they are taking or not taking are really important to help ensure that we keep up to date with what is happening. Then there is that flight of foot of ensuring we are giving teachers the opportunity to know what the new issues that are happening are.
Often, in many ways, the teachers will be ahead of us, because they will be meeting and working with young people as well. We need that feedback, but some of the national surveys are really important for keeping us up to date with what is happening with our children and young people and what their views are.
Q187 Chair: Do you have any thoughts on space within the curriculum? I will give you two questions. One, does primary do a better job on preparation for later life than secondary? Let’s start with that as a question. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? Do you have any thoughts on whether primary schools typically do a more holistic job, if that is the right word?
Michael O’Toole: I am afraid both are the answer. Lots of research, particularly into early intervention as a preventative approach, demonstrates that reaching young people at the earliest possible age begins a life‑course approach that can build skills and resilience within young people through, definitely, primary and into secondary.
We are in the process of launching a programme aimed at six to eight‑year‑olds called the Good Behaviour Game, which comes from North America and is demonstrating incredible outcomes for young adults when they experience that programme between the ages of six and eight. There are elements within there on drugs and alcohol, but obviously it is not specifically talking about the nature of drugs and alcohol with young people at that age; it is creating the types of life skills that will enable them to navigate those risks as and when they approach them in their life.
Q188 Chair: My question was specifically whether primary in general does a better job than secondary. Do you find that? You talked about a programme you are launching in primary. Is it easier to find space in the curriculum and support in primary for initiatives like this than it is in secondary?
Michael O’Toole: It is, yes. In our experience it is.
Crispin Drummond: The answer must be yes. Primary schools tend to be smaller and cosier and the children are more dutiful, perhaps, as well, so it is possible for teachers to create an ethos, to know the child and really to help them along—and in all those points secondary schools are a bit different.
Q189 Chair: In all of the submissions, I have not seen a great deal about making space. People said, “Make PSHE statutory, because that will force schools to create demand for training.” We were discussing earlier as a Committee whether the nature of secondary schools, the number of GCSEs that people sit, is just not leaving enough room in the curriculum and whether one way of delivering PSHE is simply to create the space within the secondary curriculum. Do you have any sympathy with that?
Crispin Drummond: Another point is that secondary schools can be big and impersonal and they do not have the opportunity to create what is known as an ethos, a sense of camaraderie and so forth. Too many teachers seem not to know the names of pupils who are not exactly in their classes and so on and so forth. The sense of belonging and community spirit is much more difficult to engender there.
Q190 Chair: Does anyone have anything specifically on creating space?
Dr Hoskins: It is quite important to look at the evidence base about how you do deliver PSHE. It is obviously what goes on in the classroom, but it is also taking whole‑school approaches. If you are looking at, say, emotional health and well-being, what are the policies on bullying? How are they adhered to within the class? What happens in the playground? To really develop personal, health and social education, it also needs a whole‑school approach, as well as what happens in the classroom.
Q191 Chair: So far, both of you are illustrating my point, which is that nobody seems to address this issue of the fact that secondary schools are so driven by current habits with accountability tables and curriculum. There is very little room for PSHE and no one seems to be commenting on that. Maybe that is because it is not important. Does anyone have anything to add on that—any sense that we should be trying to somehow or other create an incentive for fewer GCSEs to be taken, for instance? What on earth is the point of someone taking 10 or 11 when they could take eight perfectly well, have a broad curriculum and we could have more time to develop character, grit, resilience, financial understanding and the rest?
Michael Mercieca: Yes, space is an issue, and it is also an issue for teachers. Teachers are pretty overloaded at this point in time. In Young Enterprise, I now run a charity where financial education—through the pfeg merger—has just come on to the curriculum. Enterprise education was taken off the curriculum following the Wolf Report.
However, with PSHE, it is already in schools. It is not going to be completely new, so maybe the space issue, although it is there, will not be that large. However, making it statutory would just give it more focus on teacher training, as previous people have been saying, and Ofsted would also be measuring it, so at the beginning and the end it would get more focus. There is a problem spacewise, but, since it is already there, it is maybe not such a problem.
Q192 Chair: You mentioned workload. In the last couple of weeks, Nicky Morgan has announced a workload challenge and has invited people to submit ways of reducing the workload of teachers, who, certainly during term time, work pretty long hours. It just seems odd, if you want more PSHE and better PSHE and more training of teachers and all the rest of it, that no one’s looking to reduce something else in order to make that possible without further burdening teachers with solving it. Some of them feel already that they are asked to solve all our social ills, and it is just added on and no one ever takes anything away from them.
Crispin Drummond: We have a number of schools that have very good-quality PSHE and they do not seem to need any further resources or further training for them to deliver that. There is some benchmarking to be done against the best practice.
Michael O’Toole: Good PSHE is part of the answer to the resource challenge as well, in that there is evidence to demonstrate that schools with a good PSHE environment have better behaviour standards, and better overall academic performance and outcome standards as well. In the previous session, there were several references to the pretty high level of support from the teaching profession for PSHE, and part of that is they see that good‑quality teaching can underpin a broader environment within the school that is conducive to better performance, better behaviour and better outcomes.
Q193 Bill Esterson: In the examples you have just quoted, are the schools you are talking about in areas of deprivation or not, or is it a mix? What is the background?
Michael O’Toole: Do you mean in terms of improved performance?
Bill Esterson: Yes.
Michael O’Toole: It was a pretty big study. I do not know enough about the breakdown, but it was a large‑scale study that covered a large number of schools.
Q194 Bill Esterson: The reason for asking that is that there is a tendency, perhaps, for more affluent parents to say, “We are taking care of those subjects,” and it is perhaps children from more deprived backgrounds who are in greater need of this sort of support. Have you got evidence to say whether that is true or not?
Dr Hoskins: The generic evidence is around that better personal health and well-being supports better educational attainment and vice versa. I would need to go back to the actual research, but I am sure it looked at all different types of schools. However, I am happy to go back and feed that back in to the Committee. It does go across all different levels of schools.
Q195 Bill Esterson: Coming back to Graham’s question, when accountability is so important and when league tables are everything, is it possible to do something like PSHE properly unless you include it as something that counts towards those league tables?
Michael O’Toole: If it is a statutory requirement and it has a focus within Ofsted inspection—although I agree with the points made earlier that it absolutely will not be a silver bullet that changes everything overnight—it will create momentum to improve and focus within schools more generally.
Michael Mercieca: On Young Enterprise’s evidence, when enterprise education was on the curriculum five years ago, we used to support 450,000 students in the UK. Now, five years later, we are supporting 250,000. It is a harder sell to go into schools when they say, “It is not on the curriculum. I have to deliver the results—the league tables.” Our evidence is if it is not on the curriculum, it makes it much harder to get it taught in schools.
Q196 Bill Esterson: Does the fact that there are so many different subjects make it difficult to do justice to PSHE? Is there a link between personal, social, health and economic education?
Michael Mercieca: We think there is, and the key is the method of teaching. It does come back to how the teacher is supported, because they are overloaded. If it is learning by doing, where you are empowering the student to do something themselves or discover something for themselves or do a project for themselves within a safe environment, which is a school, they will learn. They then develop traits—these are things that sound really grand, but they are not—like risk assessment, which is basically saying, “That is not a good idea. That did not work. I should not do that again.”
If you are doing stuff in our area—i.e. enterprise, business, running a company or making something out of a tenner—then they just seem to develop as individuals. If you go around our schools, you will find—87% of our schools are state schools—that teachers will tell you, “Lucy was very shy and retiring and then grew into more of a rounded individual, a more confident individual.”
We believe—and we do not have evidence to prove this, although we are starting to evaluate our programmes—that then when it comes to things like the sexual side they will become more aware of things. We think there is a link just by developing individuals. We call it “learning by doing”.
Dr Hoskins: For me, that is how some of the learning could be integrated into the curriculum. I am sure that by learning about maths you could certainly pick up some of the skills you would need in what the previous speaker was talking about. That is the importance of integrating into the curriculum as well as having it especially taught in individual lessons.
Q197 Bill Esterson: As PSHE, it works best as a collection of subjects that might appear not to be related, because of the way it is taught and because of the development aspects in learning. Do you all agree with that?
Crispin Drummond: There is one subject, which is to promote good, responsible behaviour in later life; that is the common point. It is absolutely based on relationships, which are first and foremost. These other matters of sex, drugs and money are subordinate to that. Relationships are the fundament of your self‑esteem; they dominate the way you handle your life and take your big decisions later. It is relationships first, foremost and for ever. Coming out of a good primary school, a child may have a good start because they have got past the elements of how to get on in the playground.
Relationships are for the young people to decide upon. PSHE puts the young people in the driving seat here. They can set the agenda; they can indicate how issues should be progressed; and they can form their own conclusions. There are no right answers, exactly, and they are able, as they go through secondary school, to handle these issues. They have this awareness we are scared of; they have this background knowledge we are afraid of; and they can bring it forward, because they want to assume a kind of responsibility to cope with the challenges of life. They are nearly grown‑ups, for heaven’s sake, and we must treat them as partners in this enterprise, rather than objects or victims and so forth.
Relationships cannot be taught, and that is why we have so many difficulties coming out about the difficulty of teachers handling issues of common humanity. Why is that difficult? Why is talking to young people difficult? However, they do have that problem, possibly because they are taught to be teachers, which is with an agenda, top‑down, trickle‑down and simplify, when this is about values and joined‑up thinking.
If it cannot be taught, it can definitely be learnt by way of personal experience, which can sometimes be quite torrid, reflection—schools are very good nowadays at helping young people to reflect—and then other people’s experiences. That is what my group can do: engage with young people and give them not theoretical case studies but real life case studies for them to chew.
Q198 Bill Esterson: Can you just explain how you do that?
Crispin Drummond: In a snapshot, with good advice and preparation, we will have a volunteer married couple facing a class of 15‑year‑olds—four walls, door shut—and they are invited to ask any and every question that comes to mind about that couple’s experience in their own relationship, their family life, whatever—no holds barred.
You are quite right: they are thinking of one thing to start with, which is sex. But you can get beyond that. I have done this with my wife many times. Typically, the first few questions of these young people are based on themselves. They say to her, “How did you know he was the one for you?” or they move on to say, “Did you have to sleep with him before you became an item?” or then, more troubling for all of us, “Is it not boring to be married after the age of 25?” You have to handle those questions. They move on, though, because they are moving. They say to her, in response to some knowledge, “How did you stand it when he had done you wrong? What was your response?” or they say to me, “Since you made such a Horlicks of your first marriage, why were you brave enough to go in for it again?” which is a good question.
However, later on—it honestly does not matter what the demographic is, or whether they are challenged neighbourhoods or something, because all of them are up for this kind of thing—they will have a question like, “Didn’t your friends tell you to ditch him once he lost his job?” which is three sets of relationships in one question, or, “How did her mother take it when she found out you could not have children?” This is heavy stuff, and these kids are up to it. Any prescriptive top‑down sort of lesson about PSHE does not come near to this kind of issue, but they are up for it.
As a consequence of this, the answers, of course, are sort of personal but, oddly enough, out come words like compassion, tolerance, forgiveness, love. In a real‑time setting that is impressive, and they are all writing down their little notes afterwards for their feedback, and they come back saying things like, “I never knew that. Maybe, you know, that could be for me,” or they say, “It takes a lot of work,” and they say, “But it might be worth it.” That is news for them, and the biggest thing they say is “hope”.
Q199 Bill Esterson: Moving on to a different question, do you foresee other subjects being added to what is covered by PSHE—it might even change the acronym—for example, in relation to equalities or violence against women and girls?
Dr Hoskins: PSHE should be informed by what the data tell us the problems are, both at a national level and within local areas as well and, indeed, within the school. If there is an issue in the school—in Rotherham, obviously, there have been some challenges—then you need to respond to what the issues are that young people are bringing up. If young people are bringing up an issue they want to work on and think about, it needs to be set within that context. For me, it is driven by what the data are telling us, looking at what is happening in the local area, and informed by the young people as to the issues that they are trying to tackle.
Q200 Bill Esterson: The Youth Select Committee concluded that schools play a critical role in supporting young people to develop the skills and knowledge that will help them in later life, and then they listed a whole set of possible subjects. It is quite a new subject for a lot of parents, though, who will not have experienced it at school. Is school the right place rather than it being parents? Should it predominantly be at school, or elsewhere, or a combination? What is the right mix?
Michael Mercieca: We think it predominantly has to be school, when you have that captive market of about 20,000 schools and about 15 million people in the whole education system, from primary right through to colleges and universities. What we find on, say, the financial education piece is that when the pupils or the students go home with some work they have done or something they have learned, and maybe the parents, as some teachers are, are not that commercially aware, the parents then get engaged. However, it has to be in the school system, because school is there to prepare young people for life and, certainly for our part, along with sex and health, it is all part of life, so it has to be, in our view, in the education system. The parents then catch on and support it.
Michael O’Toole: I agree with that, in part. Founding this in school does one really important thing for me, which is about universal access, which is really important. However, there are other really important pieces to a holistic approach, which definitely includes parents as well. Coming back to the fundamental question that you are posing in this Committee, making PSHE statutory will create extra motivation and, in fact, a requirement for schools to engage with parents around this subject, as they will have to across all statutory subjects. Again, they can be accountable for how they do that through Ofsted. It is principally driven through schools, and that gives that access.
Dr Hoskins: I totally agree that it is universal. The role of parents is really important, but we also must remember that there are some vulnerable groups as well and you need to ensure that they have access to this education as well. Part of that will be working with social workers or youth offending teams, just to make sure that it is universal, and recognising some kids are not in education.
Q201 Mr Ward: Unsurprisingly, almost every group or organisation that has submitted evidence believes that the issue that they are interested in should be included as a topic area, whether it is lifesaving or legal highs or LBGT issues, parenthood—whatever it may be—so you end up with a very long list. Caroline Lucas’ Private Member’s Bill has nine areas that should be included, but argues that schools should choose between the many possible topics, so it is the schools, the governing body and the head teachers within the school that should make a decision. How do we get down from this long list, what do we exclude and who makes the decision on that?
Michael O’Toole: I would say that when you end up with a very long list—and we could add to that list—thinking that then creates a modular approach to teaching PSHE that is to tick off each of those subjects in all cases is not the right approach. The first, fundamental step to good teaching is about understanding the specific needs of young people within the classroom and then within particular communities, and customising PSHE education to meet those needs, based upon a really solid understanding of those needs, then enables good teachers to be able to pick and choose, in some ways. Therefore, yes, the teachers make the choice, but based on that better understanding.
Q202 Mr Ward: It may not be a free choice, though, because you cannot expect each school to have the skill set to pick and choose from a long list, even if they believe it is necessary to teach that particular topic area within that school.
Michael O’Toole: Much of what is involved in achieving success here is not necessarily about subject expertise, such as expertise in so‑called legal highs. Sometimes that is necessary and there is the opportunity to draw in external expertise where that is helpful, but it is more about life skills and building general resilience and, as Crispin was saying, a better approach to relationships and better self‑awareness through reflective learning. That builds the young person’s resilience, particularly in our case, where we are trying to reduce harm, to a range of intertwined risks, and there is a definite correlation between the risks of harm from alcohol and drugs, risky sexual behaviours, gangs, and violence against women and girls. There is evidence to demonstrate that these things are very much interlinked.
Dr Hoskins: I suppose I agree with the whole relationship, but there are certain things, if you look at the data, where we have challenges in this country. For instance, there is a doubling of the level of obesity from starting reception to leaving primary school in year six. One in five of our children are obese. There has been a threefold increase in the number of teenagers who self‑harm in the last decade.
Q203 Chair: Sorry, I do not mean to interrupt. It is important stuff, but the question is how do you choose? The truth is this is a long list and they all make a pretty strong case. Who does not think relationships are thoroughly important? Who does not think LGBT and homophobic bullying is important? Who does not think all these health elements are important? They all are, but David’s question is how on earth you choose. You cannot teach all of them and you are not going to do it in a modular fashion, and the people for the specific areas would say to a generalised view about giving kids a bit more resilience and skill, “That is not going to let them know all about the detail of how it feels to be a bullied gay person,” or whatever.
Dr Hoskins: I suppose what I am saying is that there are some key issues that would be across the country, but then within different schools, when you talk, they will have their own specific issues and, also, talking to the young people, what are the issues that they are talking about? That is to try to help develop at a local level what the big issues are that they want to pick up, but there are some wide areas.
Q204 Mr Ward: I am worried that the final decision is made on the basis of “I know somebody who could come in and talk on that, so that would be a really good session”. “We do not know anybody who could talk on teenage pregnancy. I cannot really think of anyone.” “Oh, I know somebody who could come in. Let us do that.”
Dr Hoskins: That is why good teacher training is important. It is important that it is incorporated in the general curriculum and that there is a whole‑school approach. The teachers being trained on how to deliver this and how to incorporate it into the curriculum are really important to help in that process of what happens.
Q205 Mr Ward: There is a danger in moralising, but very often the very best way for young people to learn is from someone who has made that mistake and been through that. You might have a couple come in who say, “We have never been involved in drugs at all,” or, “No, we did not have a teenage pregnancy. However, let us talk about the general principles,” and so on. It is much better if you have a young person in there saying, “Look, I went through it, made mistakes at the age of 14; I am living with it now, I have three kids,” but those people may not be around, so what do you do? Do you not do that subject?
Dr Hoskins: That is why there is a curriculum of what you need to cover, and people coming into schools can be really helpful, but it is not the only thing. They will add on to what is also happening in the curriculum, and somebody coming in to do one‑off lectures and then leaving is not the most effective way of doing it. It has to be built into the curriculum, built into the training process and, yes, with adjunctive people coming in. Of course, that peer learning is really important as well.
Michael Mercieca: The solution is obviously in the curriculum. There are mandatory parts, so you are right. Things like obesity are an issue, so the healthy eating piece; financial education is on the curriculum; and then there is guidance on areas that local areas, again based on data that should cover those areas, can choose from. Then it is back to the teacher training at the front, Ofsted monitoring at the end. They obviously do the mandatory piece, so it covers the big piece, and schools should then be able to prove that they are tackling a local issue, which is why they have chosen something.
Crispin Drummond: Schools are never going to supply everything that is required, particularly since they seem to have given up on sport and music and so forth when compared with the good old days. However, they are the best places in society for people to come and discuss what can be just leisure pursuits and interests, which can be socially important topics. The school could well be given the responsibility for facilitating all that, but not necessarily providing very much of it at all. It really is an opportunity for parents to get involved and, until now, parent involvement in parent-teacher meetings is pretty poor, but if they are given something to do and some way of getting involved, there is hope for more collaboration.
Q206 Chair: Okay. Ann, what structures need to exist to get schools to take a more long‑term view of the child’s future, so that they see their physical and mental health, for instance, as a priority? Does something not need to happen to change their incentives?
Dr Hoskins: There is a good link between emotional health and well‑being and educational attainment.
Chair: In that case, it is fine. As long as their accountability is on academic attainment, and as long as they know that good health will contribute, then everything is okay.
Dr Hoskins: No, I am not sure that I said that.
Chair: I was just trying to be provocative.
Dr Hoskins: I got that one. For me, it is about the schools recognising this. You get what you inspect, and if Ofsted includes emotional health and well‑being in its inspection regime, that is really important. In the previous session, you talked about whether you should measure health outcomes by school. That would be quite difficult. Say you were looking at teenage pregnancy. You may have one pregnancy one year and none the next year. Therefore, to measure schools on those types of outcomes is really difficult, but it is about inspecting whether the school is taking that whole‑school ethos. It is looking at how everything that goes on in the school is supporting the child’s emotional health and well‑being, for example. “What is your policy on bullying?” “What are the teachers doing? What is the role model? What is being sold in the canteen to promote healthy eating?” Those sorts of things are important as well, and I think Ofsted has a role in looking at the ethos of the school. It is not just about educational attainment; it is about rounded individuals.
Crispin Drummond: You can ask the young people, when they are at school and also in the two or three years afterwards, how well they felt prepared in terms of knowing themselves, coping with challenges and so on. They rapidly meet people from other schools, and their opinion just a couple of years later would be very interesting feedback.
Q207 Chair: Okay. Are there any other thoughts on that?
Michael Mercieca: Schools have to be tracked on destination data, and this is a 20‑year project. You have to start measuring schools by area, by outcomes, and then you can see if it is reducing youth unemployment and if it is affecting health or crime issues in the area. The whole education structure could do with a change in terms of involving other people. We all know about the skills gap. There is a huge skills gap, so that can be addressed, and then it is cross‑party, cross‑parliamentary. But unless you measure the effectiveness of schools by how young people succeed in life, through a number of measures, we are not really going to make much progress.
Q208 Chair: No, it is trying to tease that out, isn’t it? The trouble with destination data is that it is early days. It is only several years on. If you are a head teacher in a struggling school and you are going to lose your job if you do not get the percentage of GCSEs that you require, guess what you are focused on. It is not the fact that in four years’ time people are going to tell you that you have a, sadly, higher than expected level of NEETs.
Michael Mercieca: To clarify, it is widening it from just being measured on the academic results, so there has to be this transitional period. Yes, in the short term you have to focus on the academic results, but in the longer term, five years plus, you start being measured on other outcomes. That was mentioned in Lord Young’s Enterprise for All report, which is very important.
Chair: Michael, do you have any thoughts on that?
Michael O’Toole: From our experience, I would not give up on having ambitions about being able to track outcomes as a result of better PSHE, but I do agree that it is long‑term stuff.
Q209 Chair: For the record, the Committee is very keen on that. It is just trying to get an accountability structure that is not too onerous but, equally, is sufficiently topical and recent to affect decision‑making and deploying of teachers, et cetera, now. If it becomes part of historic analysis of education outcomes, that does not impact on someone who is scared stiff of losing their job in the coming set of results.
Crispin Drummond: You could ask the parents.
Q210 Chair: They suggest doing it with the pupils, which gives you something a bit more possible.
Dr Hoskins: The pupils idea is quite interesting. There is a survey that is going to come out in the autumn about the health behaviour of school‑aged children. This is 5,500 pupils in England, 74% of whom thought that PSHE helped them and 42% felt that the PSHE was not as challenging as it should be. Interestingly, when I talked to some young people they said they thought it should be a GCSE, because then their teachers would take it as seriously as they would. I am not saying I agree with that, but it is interesting that that is what the young people said to us. Also, 47% did not think that relationships and sex education was covered well. This is topical feedback from young people at the time.
Q211 Craig Whittaker: And 38% of young people cannot ever remember having any form of education around financial stuff, for example. Is that because it is boring?
Michael Mercieca: Yes. It comes back to the learning-by-doing point. Learning by doing is now well tested. Young Enterprise has been around over 50 years; it came out of the States as part of a worldwide group in 120 countries, so the programmes are constantly refreshed, but the whole ethos is about getting young people to do something—to take responsibility. For example, on one programme they set up a company, choose the staff and get rid of the staff if they are not performing.
Q212 Craig Whittaker: Is that not best done in maths, though?
Michael Mercieca: The challenge for us with financial education on the curriculum is making things like compound interest interesting, and we believe, again, you will do that by linking it to, say, in the primary programme, our Fiver programme, where we dish out a fiver for a month and they make some money out of that. You have to get them to do something.
Q213 Craig Whittaker: Is it worth doing that, though? Quite a lot of these young people do not leave home until they are in their late 20s or 30s now, and getting a mortgage is a long way off when you are at high school, for example.
Michael Mercieca: The mortgage piece would come at the end, but things like buying games online is happening, looking after pocket money, getting a weekend job, how to manage that money, what to do with that money. The mortgage and the pension are further down the line. However, it is memorable. If they do it, they will remember it. All our students remember. If they remember one thing from school, it is that.
Q214 Craig Whittaker: Therefore, the 38% figure will drastically improve as time progresses with the new curriculum. Is that what you are saying?
Michael Mercieca: Yes, because we will make it interesting, but Young Enterprise is a small part. We have 250,000 students out of 15 million, so it is small.
Q215 Craig Whittaker: Ofsted says that its requirement to report on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development will lead inspectors to look at PSHE. Are you confident that the inspection of financial education will be included in that process?
Michael Mercieca: In a word, no. We have to work on that. We need to work with Ofsted to get it measured, but currently it is not going to be very well measured, no.
Q216 Craig Whittaker: It is not enough, so that needs to change.
Michael Mercieca: Yes.
Q217 Alex Cunningham: Michael O’Toole, the proportion of 11‑ to 15‑year‑olds drinking alcohol at least once a week has fallen from 26% to 10% between 2003 and 2012. Illegal drug use amongst the same group is at its lowest level since 2001. That is without any changes—no statutory requirement for PSHE—so is school education already an effective tool in tackling alcohol and drug abuse issues?
Michael O’Toole: It may be part of it. There are complicated reasons behind some of the trends that you describe, but I suppose I would come back to the point I was making, which is that I do not believe that necessarily drugs, alcohol or, indeed, any of the other subjects that we have talked about always has to be a separate module within this approach. It very much needs to be driven by understanding local needs, by talking to the young people and understanding what the issues are for them. There are some more concerning patterns, particularly around new psychoactive drugs and a real lack of understanding about the harms of those drugs, mistakenly called legal highs.
Q218 Alex Cunningham: So what is the role of the school as opposed to other agencies in highlighting some of the issues of the new, modern-drug-type activity?
Michael O’Toole: I would say that the role of good PSHE within schools is to enable young people to be more self‑aware, to be able to be resilient to peer pressure, to be able to make informed decisions and to be able to reflect on what they understand about those environments in a more supported and attached environment, which the school presents.
Q219 Alex Cunningham: Schools can be very different, though, in terms of cultural and religious attitudes to alcohol. Doesn’t that have to be addressed as well as part of the child’s need?
Michael O’Toole: Absolutely, yes and we completely recognise that. Funded by the Department for Education, we provide a platform of resources for teachers, called ADEPIS, to help them navigate some of these very issues. One of the things we have just been focused on is creating briefings for teachers around understanding cultural issues and ensuring that that is built into that holistic approach. I absolutely recognise that issue.
Q220 Alex Cunningham: Does your pack advocate parents being able to withdraw their children from drugs and alcohol education as well as sex and relationship education?
Michael O’Toole: No, we do not have a statement on that.
Q221 Alex Cunningham: What is your position on that?
Michael O’Toole: I was here for the earlier session and I noted the discomfort among the panel trying to answer that question. As a charity, we do not have a position on that. My personal drivers here are very much accessibility and universal opportunity for young people, so my personal reaction is that there should not be that opportunity for parents to withdraw.
Q222 Alex Cunningham: Is that to do with alcohol or is it to do with sex and relationship education?
Michael O’Toole: It is to do with this whole approach.
Q223 Alex Cunningham: Okay. Can we have a comment from the others on that?
Crispin Drummond: One of the biggest drivers of young people’s behaviour is peer discussions, which used to be limited to the playground or the bicycle shed, but nowadays are much more concerned with internet communications. The friendship groups that people have will inform them and advise them about their attitude towards eating meat, which is against, and alcohol and drugs, which is increasingly against, and we are very grateful when the internet works in, as it were, our favour.
Alex Cunningham: Are there any other comments?
Michael Mercieca: Just a point on how to teach the drug‑type abuse problems in schools. For eight and a half years, I was director of finance and operations for the programmes at the Prince’s Trust that focused on NEETs. We came up with the ambassadors, and the most powerful thing, we found, was that if you send someone into the classroom who has suffered from drug problems and has been living on the street, it is much better than sending the police in there.
On the point about whether parents can withdraw their children from these classes, I would say, on drugs and alcohol, no. On the sexual one, it has to be age appropriate and that is the difficulty: what age? I certainly would not want my 13‑year‑old, who is now 23 years old, taught. It has to be age appropriate, but once you find that age, then no: you are taught in school and that is that.
Alex Cunningham: Ann, do you have a view?
Dr Hoskins: Universal requirement.
Q224 Alex Cunningham: Universal requirement, okay. Finally, from me, sex and relationship education—or now we should be calling it relationship and sex education—can sometimes be portrayed as working on the pragmatic assumption that some young people engage in sexual activity below the age of consent. Is a similar assumption made on alcohol and drugs education?
Michael O’Toole: It is, in some cases, yes. This comes back to Michael’s point. It is very much about age-appropriate approaches and about understanding the individual child’s perspective and needs, but absolutely, and there is evidence of harm from underage abuse of, particularly, alcohol, and there is evidence of the damage that that does in terms of attainment, not least educationally.
Q225 Alex Cunningham: Therefore, should the emphasis be on harm reduction rather than just prevention?
Michael O’Toole: Yes, it should be.
Q226 Chair: Does anyone disagree with that? No.
Q227 Mr Ward: As to the earlier comments you made, Crispin, on the importance of the “R” in the SRE and the workshop that you described, would you ever use two men or two women in that situation to talk about their longstanding relationship?
Crispin Drummond: We could do. The methodology would work very well there and, as it happens, despite one remark I made, most of the discussion is about relationships between, as it were, any two people. For our part, we are determined not to have an agenda in particular, not to have any judgments in particular and not to steer towards any outcomes in particular. That is how, if you like, transparent we are.
As it happens, I think it is the case that none or nearly none of the young people have ever raised questions about same-sex marriage. I know it has been big in other places, but all the young people I know think it is not an issue and it certainly does not have any principles attached to it, so we just respond to that. As somebody said a moment ago, most of them are supposing that hetero marriage is at least an example that we all kind of know and can look at in its way, but there are no, if I can put it like this, principles to say yes or no on that one.
Q228 Mr Ward: I remember my youngest son had a friend whose parents were a gay couple in a longstanding relationship and he had a pretty awful time, I have to say, at school as a result of that, unfortunately. He could have done with some of this relationship training maybe for the other people in the school at the time. The reason I ask is that the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 encompasses same-sex couples, but the 2000 Government guidance on SRE states that pupils should be taught about the nature and importance of marriage for family life and bringing up children.
Crispin Drummond: Yes, and then there is that guidance note, if it was a guidance note, that was talked about in the earlier session, which we have read carefully, and we think that what we offer is plumb central in that and does not have any issues for us and does not have any issues for anybody else. In a sense, it is incumbent on a school, with its governors and its pupils, to devise a policy that may well include same-sex marriage being represented, which is what Stonewall is, quite correctly, asking for, and we do not have a problem with that. The understanding, though, is that it should be what is called proportional or representative or something, which does tend to mean—I do not know what the figure is, 5%, 7%, 10%—not too much airtime when compared with other possibilities.
Q229 Mr Ward: Okay. I will just go straight on to the next question and, using your own words, how should schools take a role in helping young people understand and discuss the ideals and practice of love, tenderness, care and concern?
Crispin Drummond: We are happy with the example that we have of giving real-life examples where these words turn out to be more than ideals; they are tough love in action, and the dilemmas that life throws up have to be reconciled.
Q230 Alex Cunningham: I have finished all my questions, Chair. I beg your pardon. My name is against question number 35. I do beg your pardon. Some elements of PSHE education are already delivered through other subjects.
Mr Ward: 32.
Alex Cunningham: Sorry?
Mr Ward: 32, isn’t it?
Alex Cunningham: 33. I will do 33 first and then I will gather my thoughts. I will start again. Some elements of PSHE education are delivered through other subjects. Financial education is now part of the national curriculum for maths. Healthy eating and the effects of recreational drugs are referred to in the national curriculum for biology. Would just a purely cross‑curriculum approach to this not do the job?
Chair: Fully embedded, no need for anything discrete.
Mr Ward: So, we do not need an hour every day to have PSHE, or half‑hour.
Michael Mercieca: If I leap in on financial education, we think that having it as part of PSHE will work better, because in the other subjects in which it sits, citizenship and maths, it is going to be non‑personal, so you talk about hypothetical-type mathematical problems rather than personal ones about how to manage or avoid debt.
Q231 Chair: Isn’t part of the trouble with the teaching of maths in this country that it is so theoretical, and if it was made a lot more practical and personal, you would engage more people and they would not think they were bad at it? Discuss.
Michael Mercieca: It is very true, and that is back to my point about how we want to make compound interest interesting. Teachers do find that it is too theoretical, and their students are saying, “Why am I going to have to learn about Pythagoras? What use is that going to be?”
Q232 Chair: So, if maths was done properly, you would not need to have a discrete bit, so David is right: in the ideal world it would just be personalised and embedded in maths.
Michael Mercieca: If it was done in a different way, it could work, yes.
Chair: I am slightly putting words in your mouth; I apologise.
Michael O’Toole: I would say no. As you describe, elements are rightly covered across other subjects and the nature, obviously, of PSHE is that it is very over‑arching. However, coming back to some of the earlier questions on the focus within schools, resources being provided and accountability, it requires its own separate time on the timetable too.
Q233 Chair: Ann, the embedded ideal, yes or no?
Dr Hoskins: No. Embedded, yes, but you also need that holistic approach; you are looking at the young person, the resilience—the overall working with young people on that. If you pick it up quite systematically in all the different subjects, you will not get that holistic, rounded, approach.
Q234 Alex Cunningham: We have a long way to go to convince anybody that PSHE should have that really heavy, dedicated time that some people may like it to have. But is it realistic, given the fact that the schools are under tremendous pressure to get all those academic subjects into the curriculum, with more after-school events in order to support the core curriculum? Is it realistically possible to make time in the school curriculum?
Crispin Drummond: Yes, as it happens.
Q235 Alex Cunningham: How? Is it realistic to say to a head teacher, “You will have X number of minutes or X number of hours a month on PSHE”? Is that really possible in the pressured world that head teachers have at the moment? I see lots of nods.
Michael O’Toole: It can be. I do not underestimate how difficult it is, but it needs to be, for some of the reasons we have described, and also not least the economic argument, which is very clear, that good early-intervention and prevention approaches save the state massive amounts of money.
Q236 Alex Cunningham: Is extending the school day the answer?
Michael Mercieca: I would make the point I made earlier: it is already being taught in schools. Yes, there is always a space problem, but it is already in there, so it is not a huge problem and, yes, other things can be looked at and reduced in time. In terms of PSHE, it is hugely important and it is back to managing and assessing risk. It goes across the whole piece. It is a problem, but it is not insurmountable; maybe other things will have to have less time.
Dr Hoskins: For me, I suppose it is about what our education system is there to do. Is it to deliver rounded individuals who have high educational achievement, or is it there just for high educational achievement? Surely if we are looking at the issues that we are dealing with in society, it is rounded individuals.
Q237 Alex Cunningham: You are back to the Chair’s point: why have more than eight GCSEs in your curriculum? If you do them well and are taught well, but also have all this much more rounded education, you would be more content.
Q238 Chair: Ann, I am not sure that really answers Alex’s question, because no-one is saying it should only be the academic. It is saying that maths done properly should be engaging, personalised and a problem‑solving tool that is relevant to real life, and Macbeth will tell you about the toxic nature of some relationships and how they lead you into dreadful places, and Romeo and Juliet will show even when it is gorgeous and beautiful you can still end up dead. There is all sorts of stuff you can learn if it is done properly, and you can inspire the kids, they get A*s and they also come out thinking, having genuinely reflected on relationships, finance and compound interest and the like. Is that not true? I am just wondering whether the utopian ideal would not have PSHE; it would have it all embedded right across, because everything would be made relevant, interesting and have deep philosophical lessons taught.
Crispin Drummond: The answer to your question is yes. Good drama and good literature can be helpful, but also good subjects that are completely outside school, which include sport and music and things—people can get good PSHE advantages from that.
Q239 Craig Whittaker: Crispin, your group obviously acts as an external charity/company going into schools on a commissioning basis. Why should schools not just adopt their own processes for teaching these things rather than getting in expensive consultants?
Crispin Drummond: There is know-how involved, and we are proud of it, but we would gladly, as it were, sell it or share it, so there is no obstacle to that. It does tend to be the case that, with the intimacy that is involved, it is an emotionally difficult thing to choreograph. It is quite instructive that some schools are more welcoming than others, in the sense that the young people are capable of handling these issues more articulately than others because they have had good PSHE beforehand, in some sense. One of our features is the authenticity of the people we put forward.
Q240 Craig Whittaker: Why can the schools not do that? Why do they have to commission you?
Crispin Drummond: They could, and they have a lovely group of parents out there who keep on saying, “If only there was more we could do for our young people.” There is an easy answer. A little bit of anonymity might help, so that you put parents from one school into another and vice versa, but that is easy to plan, so, yes, it is a good thing.
We do put some effort into training our facilitators. We have a person who goes in to prepare the class and help them what they are about to think about and get them to identify their hopes and fears for what they might get out of the session. That helps jolly things along very well, so that the exact session, the dialogue, generally is very satisfying to all parties. However, it could be done.
Q241 Craig Whittaker: Do you often go in and teach teachers to deliver as well? Just going back to the parent thing, I still recall the horror on my own children’s faces when I used to go into the school to do something.
Crispin Drummond: Yes, so you should have gone into a different school.
Q242 Craig Whittaker: Absolutely, but do you teach the teachers?
Crispin Drummond: We could do. We hold up a palette of requests saying, “We are really looking for schools that would like to join us in this endeavour. We are looking for volunteers amongst parents, and we are looking amongst people who could be these facilitators,” which takes a little bit of training, we think two days—not a lot—to get the issues right and get the rules of engagement right, because you do not want to go overboard. Yes, is the answer.
Q243 Craig Whittaker: Okay. Do we know to what extent PSHE topics are covered by charities or youth groups—all those types of things that are external to schools? Does anybody have any idea?
Michael O’Toole: I have quite a bit of experience in the drug and alcohol area.
Craig Whittaker: So have I—on a different plane from where you are.
Michael O’Toole: I think so. There is quite an established track record of external organisations, principally charities, going into schools. I would add a note of caution to that approach, and this follows on from Alex’s earlier question about the effectiveness of some of those interventions. Given the non‑statutory basis for PSHE, there is some risk that some of those programmes are not really fitting within a quality assured framework, and they need to be.
Q244 Craig Whittaker: We had the discussion with the last panel about putting things on a statutory footing. We know from religious education, for example, that it is on a statutory footing, but its delivery is a postcode lottery. Just a statutory footing is not going to deliver the quality.
Michael O’Toole: No.
Q245 Craig Whittaker: So, what is this big thing around putting things on a statutory footing?
Michael O’Toole: Teacher training is the critical element.
Q246 Craig Whittaker: But we train teachers to deliver religious education in a big way. In fact, they are specialists, but it still does not ensure that quality is going to be delivered. You started off with the comment about having to have a look at the quality being delivered from charities and youth groups, for example. How do we sustain that in school? If they are not the ones to do it, how do we make sure that happens consistently on an even footing? I am not convinced that a statutory footing is the answer to that.
Michael Mercieca: As we have all said, the statutory footing means that teachers get trained, and on your point that that does not guarantee it, that is what Ofsted is there for, and it is meant to pick up bad teaching.
In terms of the charity piece, a charity is not going to continue to be funded by its funders, whether those are private or public, if it delivers bad services. Certainly, in Young Enterprise, if we go into a school and the teachers do not see a benefit to the students, they will not take the programme again. So, it is self‑regulating and, in a way, although we are a charity, it is commercial. If the service is not good, they will not take it. As a charity, we go into schools; we take volunteers—people from the local community, business people—who mentor the students. They are telling them their real life experiences, so we are getting businesses into schools, so it does work and, in a way, it is self‑regulating, because if we do not do it well we will not be funded.
Crispin Drummond: My answer is that it takes a statutory footing to get Ofsted to do something and it could already have the oomph to promote best practice and to wave the flag and to encourage, advise and warn, in the way that it flatly does not, in this area. If you look at its website for identified best practice, there is close to nothing there, and it could, of course, be having lesson plans for whole terms from the good schools that are already doing this thing as a benchmark. Just communication would be a good thing, and if it takes statutory to get them to do it, I wish they would.
Chair: Super. Thank you very much indeed. As I said to the last panel, if you have any further thoughts, particularly about recommendations, however small, whether that is for change or, indeed, certain elements of the status quo that need to be retained, please reinforce any points you have already made to us and be in touch, if you so desire. Thank you very much indeed.
Oral evidence: PSHE Education and SRE in schools, HC 145 21