Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Committee

Clause 1: Curriculum requirements regarding citizenship and the natural environment

Amendment 1

Moved by

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 17, after “must” insert “by regulations”

My Lords, I rise to move the little amendment in my name and, since the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, has also signed up to it, I can cut my speech down from one hour to no more than 45 minutes. I hope that I will not be too patronising in delivering it. This is a simple amendment. Clause 1(4) of the Bill—which I support—as it stands at the moment, states:

“The Secretary of State must give guidance about the provision of education”.

After “must”, I wish to insert the words “by regulations” —because, if one looks slightly further on, the proposed subsection (3) in Clause 1(4) says:

“The governing body of a maintained secondary school must have regard to guidance under this section.”

I am moving this amendment in a private capacity but—for the next couple of weeks, in any case—I am the chair of the Delegated Powers Committee, which looked at the Bill, as it looks at all Private Members’ Bills. We do not change our guidance for private Members any more than we do for the Government. When we look at Bills, our normal rule is that, where guidance is advisory, we suggest that it should be laid before Parliament but does not have to be debated—it does not need the negative or the affirmative procedure. But when it is guidance that one “must have regard to”—as we increasingly see from government these days—we say that, in effect, it is almost mandatory, and there are legal consequences for the person or body if they do not have regard to it.

In our report, we say:

“Although a duty to have regard to statutory guidance does not imply a duty to follow it in … all respects, we have in recent years observed that a person or body required by statute to have regard to guidance will normally be expected to follow it and will in practice normally do so unless there are cogent reasons for not doing so. And yet this guidance is subject to no parliamentary scrutiny at all.”

My Lords, although it is my Bill, I thought that I could probably take advantage of Committee and speak twice. But I take this advantage to outline why I am in support of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in his very helpful amendment. When I put together the original wording, I stole it from the Act that he quoted, and I perhaps could have paid more close attention to Parliament’s role. I am very grateful to the Delegated Powers Committee for its report and consideration.

The noble Lord was kind enough to send me an email on Wednesday. When I received it, it was with a little trepidation as to what he might have to say about how he would proceed today. It was of huge reassurance when he said that his amendment is not a re-emergence of the old Eric Forth and David Maclean “wreck a Private Member’s Bill on a Friday” scenario. I am grateful for the noble Lord’s support for the Bill and for the way in which he has gone about this.

One reason for wanting to speak early in the discussion of this amendment is to have an opportunity to ask the Minister a couple of things for her to consider in her response. I think the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, agrees that there is sometimes a danger of it feeling as though the Department for Education, because it makes a lot of regulations, is reluctant to go down the road of guidance being in the regulatory form. My question to the Minister is: is there a good reason why we should not have this sort of guidance in regulation, as opposed to a good reason why, because it is important?

This is also an opportunity for me to ask the Minister whether the announcement made by the Secretary of State on 5 November, in the context of COP 26 in Glasgow, changes the Government’s position as we heard it at Second Reading. We had a different set of Ministers then and a slightly different situation. The Secretary of State made his announcement in the foreword to the document that he has then consulted upon. He said:

My Lords, this is a short, precise and extremely welcome Bill, improved by the helpful amendment presented today. I am pleased to tell noble Lords that the National Education Union—the largest education union in Europe, with 450,000 members —welcomes the Bill and the amendment.

The climate emergency is of course the existential threat to the future of all our children and young people. It is certainly the case that educators have a role to play in helping children address the threat by enabling them, as was said at Second Reading, to understand the climate emergency and ecological issues, and to think critically about how they can play their part as we seek a more sustainable way of life.

To demonstrate enthusiasm for teaching about the climate emergency and sustainability, the National Education Union worked with other organisations, including Teach the Future, to promote Climate Learning Month, which overlaps October and November, ahead of COP 26. Despite the high-quality resources produced, not all schools, and therefore not all children and young people, accessed them.

The Bill, particularly with the amendment, would ensure that all those educated in maintained schools would have access to this important area of learning. Alas, those educated in academies and free schools are not required to follow the national curriculum. However, Robin Walker, the Schools Minister, speaking on this in another place, said that

“I want us to do more to educate our children about the costs of environmental degradation and what we are doing to solve that, both now and in the future. Not only do our children deserve to inherit a healthy world, but they also need to be educated so that they are … prepared to live in a world affected by climate change, so that they may live sustainably and continue to fight the effects of climate change.”—[Official Report, Commons, 27/10/21; col. 146WH.]

It seems almost superfluous to get up to support this Private Member’s Bill because it is so self-evident that it is excellent. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, on the progress it has made. Quite simply, you can care for something only when you understand it. That is true about caring for ourselves, for each other and for the natural environment. It is especially true for what can feel like an abstract concept: caring for future generations. The Bill will help tackle not only the environmental and ecological crises but the humanitarian and mental health crises.

Our Green MP, Caroline Lucas, has done great work promoting a nature GCSE and my noble friend Lady Bennett has called for a right to nature for children. Together with this Bill and the future generations Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, we begin to see a framework for the cultural and educational shift needed to underpin an ecologically minded society that no longer destroys our living world.

It would be very wrong for your Lordships not to pay recognition to the very many young people demanding action on the ecological and climate emergencies. As well as teaching them, we must learn from them and support them to use all that energy and enthusiasm to make lasting change, because it is their future that we are discussing. They will live to be the judges of our collective action or inaction.

My Lords, this is one of those debates where we are all violently agreeing with each other and with the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. I wish the Government were always as responsive to his committee’s forensic examination of the problems of delegated legislation as my noble friend Lord Knight has been this afternoon.

I do not think there is any concern at all on the substance of my noble friend’s Bill and the amendment, but I looked at the Bill because I have a Private Member’s Bill coming up on a related matter in the new year on votes at 16 and reducing the voting age. Alongside that, which I see as a critical element of lowering the voting age, is significantly enhancing citizenship education in schools. My view is that part of the reason why we have such a massive crisis of youth engagement in politics, including on the issues my noble friend refers to in the Bill, is because we do not take citizenship sufficiently seriously in schools. We do not have automatic registration of young people at 18, or polling stations in every school, educational institution and university, as we should have.

I looked at the Bill to see how it would interact with enhanced requirements in respect of citizenship education in schools. My noble friend and I go back a long way on this, because we were fellow Ministers in the education department under the Government who introduced citizenship education under the leadership of my noble friend Lord Blunkett. There is a clear anomaly in the Bill in how it will amend education law. Because of my noble friend’s zeal in promoting citizenship education in respect of the natural environment, which I strongly support, the natural environment and sustainability, if the Bill is passed, become singled out in statute for special mention—indeed, unique mention—in respect of citizenship education, but none of the other aspects of citizenship education is then mentioned in statute at all, when they are surely just as important as citizenship education in respect of sustainability. Indeed, they are integrally linked—unless young people learn at school to be active citizens and to use the democratic process fully to advance the causes in which they believe and on which their generation depends, they will not embrace the cause of the environment as part of that.

Because this is of some importance to how our education law develops, I want to get a bit technical for a moment or two if my noble friend will forgive me. I want all this on the record because we may need to come back to it in due course. My noble friend’s Bill essentially amends Sections 80, 84 and 85 of the Education Act 2002. Perhaps I may go through the changes that it makes to each of those sections in turn. To Section 80, which covers the fundamental requirements of the national curriculum and teaching in schools, my noble friend proposes to add a new subsection (1)(f) —I should say, as amended by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, if it goes through—requiring

“provision for sustainable citizenship education for all registered pupils who are provided with secondary education”.

That section, Section 80, makes no reference to citizenship education in any respect other than sustainability and the environment. There is no reference to any requirement to teach citizenship in schools. This relates directly to the point made by my noble friend Lady Blower—I am sorry, this is educationalists speaking here—because Section 80 of the 2002 Act is the fundamental requirement apart from the national curriculum, which, as my noble friend said, does not apply to all schools. Under Section 80 as amended by this Bill, it would be a statutory requirement in all schools to teach about citizenship relating to sustainability but not citizenship relating to any other issue, including the voting process, the operation of your Lordships’ House and how one becomes involved in political parties—all of which are about to become significantly more important because another piece of legislation going through Parliament at the moment will require voter ID and therefore much greater activity on the part of young people to become voters in the first place.

Section 80 becomes very curious under this Bill. It introduces a statutory requirement which relates to certain items, of which the only one in respect of citizenship is sustainable citizenship education. Sections 84 and 85 stipulate the subjects that must be covered in the national curriculum. I add again that that applies only to some state schools; it does not apply to all state schools at the moment. The requirements in those sections in respect of sustainable citizenship and the natural world, as amended by this Bill, become very detailed. My noble friend’s amendment to Section 84, which relates to the key stage 3 curriculum, provides that

“‘citizenship’ includes programmes of study that encourage learning to protect and restore the natural environment for present and future generations, including but not limited to climate change considerations”.