My Lords, I thank all noble Lords participating today and those—five or six, I think—who have had to scratch from the debate due to travel issues. I am especially sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, was taken ill overnight and is unfortunately unable to be with us.
The importance of safeguarding children is well established and considered vital in underpinning the operation of a safe and functioning society in the UK, so there should not really be any need for us to have a debate about its importance at all in 2023. As a country, we should be able to protect all children from harm both outside of school and, especially, within it. We have in place the protocols, mechanisms and routines. Schools should be able to facilitate children to explore ideas about themselves and the world in ways which do not harm them, but children today find themselves facing a tidal wave of troubles and challenges: poor mental health, body image issues, violent pornography and online bullying for starters. Our children are unhappier than ever. What has gone wrong?
The Government’s definition of safeguarding encompasses a holistic range of measures that must be met to ensure children are safe, healthy and able to flourish. Working Together to Safeguard Children defines safeguarding as
“protecting children from maltreatment … preventing impairment of children’s mental and physical health or development … ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care”,
and
“taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes”.
Outside of the home environment, there is nothing more formative for a child than their experience at school. Consequently, parents place profound trust in schools not just to provide their child with an education but to protect their mental and physical safety too. In turn, teachers and schools take on great responsibility—one that goes well beyond the planning, preparation and delivery of lessons, the marking of work and a focus on academic development. All of those working with children in schools fundamentally shape the environment in which they grow up and are responsible to ensure this environment is, at a minimum, not harming them.
This speech starts from the belief that teachers, parents, and carers are united in wanting the best for children, but the world has changed beyond recognition since the legislative framework for safeguarding was introduced. As well-established as safeguarding protocol is in this country, it must be able to adapt in the light of new safeguarding risks facing children today.
Safeguarding is the responsibility of everyone who comes into contact with a child and their family. It is thanks to my noble friend Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone—I am delighted to see her in her place—who, as Secretary of State, introduced the Children Act in 1989, 34 years ago, during which time the world has changed beyond recognition, that we have the legislative framework for the requirements and expectations of child safeguarding in England, reinforced by subsequent legislation in 2004. Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 states that any organisation or function providing services to children is legally required to promote their welfare and to safeguard them. The Government bolstered this legislation with several statutory documents that set out safeguarding duties on schools. The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills—Ofsted—highlighted in its 2017-2022 strategy:
My Lords, I very much welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, on securing it and introducing it so effectively. She started by talking about the importance of safeguarding children. Whatever else we disagree on today in this Chamber, I think we would all accept that that is vital and that we have an obligation to ensure that it is as effective as possible. I agree with the thrust of her arguments completely. I take the view she does on many of the issues facing society and schools now. In the time I have, I want to take up just one or two points.
It is important to remember that, although awful things still happen, safeguarding in schools is far better than it was when I started teaching. We know now what risks children have and the truth is that, for many children, schools are the safest places in their lives. Huge progress has been made and we ought to acknowledge that, because it is an extra burden on teachers. Theirs is a skilled job; you have to learn to do it. I was teaching during that period of having to learn to do it, and it is not easy because it is about changing your culture. By the time you get to an adult, it is quite difficult to change that. One of the ways in which that culture has been changed over the last 20 to 30 years is in having a partnership between government and schools, where society has decided what it wants to accept and Governments have passed legislation and issued guidance so that schools have a framework in which they can make decisions. Without being complacent about what still needs to be done, that is why it has improved.
I want to take up the issues where, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, said, we have not got it right. We should not dismiss them, so I will comment on one briefly. What happens with online risks is terrible. I do not know how schools deal with them, given the tightly knit communities that they are, but at least now we have agreement in adult society that we must do as much as we can to change that and offer protection for children. We have the beginnings of a legislative framework whereby that can happen.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, on securing this important debate, and I thank her for her comprehensive introduction. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. In her time as Secretary of State she put children at the heart of education, and she is right that safeguarding today is much better than it was in the past.
Safeguarding has a set of specific meanings regarding the protection of children and vulnerable adults from abuse, neglect and harm, defined, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, mentioned, in the Children Act 1989, including protecting children from maltreatment; preventing the impairment of children’s physical and mental health or development; ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care; and taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes.
Ofsted describes good safeguarding practice as
“the culture a school creates to keep its pupils safe so that they can benefit fully from all that schooling offers. A positive and open safeguarding culture puts pupils’ interests first. Everyone who works with children is vigilant in identifying risks and reporting concerns. It is also about working openly and transparently with parents, local authorities and other stakeholders to protect pupils from serious harm, both online and offline, and about taking prompt and proportionate action”.
The Times Education Supplement’s guidance sets out the seven core issues that school governors and staff need to keep at the forefront of their minds when considering safeguarding. They are: child sexual abuse and CSA material online; child-on-child sexual violence and harassment, which sadly is growing worse; extremism and radicalisation; domestic abuse; adverse childhood experiences; trauma; and, last but not least, mental health.
My Lords, I also warmly congratulate my noble friend Lady Jenkin on initiating this important debate. It is a pleasure to speak after two other such distinguished Peers, the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris—whom I have greatly admired for a long time—and Lady Brinton, who made incredibly important points.
I was not going to raise transgender issues, gender dysphoria and all the rest today, because I always know who I disagree with and there are very few people I agree with—but I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. So, if asked for my views, I shall simply send people her speech.
Children need a stable, loving environment with consistent adults and long-term care. They need control as well as care and, of course, this should primarily come from the family. But for so many it does not, so the school has a pivotal and changing role. As has rightly been said, the expectations on teachers and head teachers have grown monumentally. Forty years ago, I used to work with Peter Wilson, who later ran Young Minds. We provided training sessions—I was working at the Maudsley—for teachers in inner city schools coping with children in devastating situations, with behaviour they could not understand and parental interventions that seemed to be absent. These teachers thought their job was to teach and were trying to get their heads round the right way to intervene and understand what was happening, how they could be helpful and what they should do.
Now, there is much greater clarity with all the safeguarding rules. The role of the school and the guidance provided are definitely a big step forward. Initially I was sceptical: when responsibility for children went from Health to Education, I was very uncomfortable. At Health, I worked hand in hand with the noble Lord, Lord Laming, and his predecessor, Sir William Utting. As a Minister, I knew exactly what the social services inspectors were thinking and what was happening on the ground. I had to appear to give evidence at the Lambeth children’s inquiry the other day. I referred to the social services inspectors who came to the top of the office meeting every week. Now at Education it is a much more fractured relationship. You have a Children’s Commissioner, but it is not the same as sitting at the same top table and understanding on a daily basis.
My Lords, I also join with everybody in congratulating my noble friend on securing this vital debate and on her excellent and clear opening speech. It is certainly an honour to follow my noble friend Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone.
Safeguarding in schools is highly complex and varied and I will touch on only two areas today, relating to the need for neutrality in our education system. Neutrality implies tolerance of a multiplicity of views; it is therefore precious but fragile and should itself be safeguarded.
Starting with the school strikes against the action in Israel and Gaza, I declare my interest as the Christian vice-chair for the Council of Christians and Jews. It was founded in 1942 by Archbishop William Temple and Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz when the Holocaust was devastating European Jewry. Her late Majesty the Queen was patron throughout her whole reign.
These strikes raise serious safeguarding concerns, with hundreds of children leaving the security of school, in lesson time, for political protests in towns and city centres. Parents and teachers have very little control over who children meet or what they are exposed to, despite schools’ legal safeguarding duties set out in DfE statutory guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education. Large crowds and a politically charged atmosphere mean that any school authorising pupils to attend a protest during school hours cannot be fully in control of the risks to safety and welfare.
Schools also risk breaching the Prevent duty, which requires them
“‘to help prevent the risk of people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism’. This includes safeguarding learners from extremist ideologies and radicalisation”.
Allowing children’s exposure to potentially genocidal or anti-Semitic slogans such as
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for obtaining this important debate. My focus today is on sport. I speak as a father and grandfather of girls and boys who are and have been active in sport. In making this speech, I am grateful for the great help I have received from the charity Women in Sport.
Sport develops important fundamental movement skills. It shapes attitudes towards physical activity. Sporting activity is essential if we are to turn our children into adults with healthy lifestyles. Today, we too often fail in this. We must do better or we will have a lot of fat, unhealthy adults. To effect this, we must start at primary school level. There, teachers and coaches must recognise that there are important differences, even at that age, between the sexes.
Even before puberty, the evidence is plain that boys have a physical advantage. Innate testosterone gives speed, strength and stamina. Young boys will generally—not always but generally—be slightly faster and stronger than girls, and that applies throughout the primary school age bracket. To avoid demotivating girls, primary schools must recognise and act on this, giving girls the chance to compete against other little girls. At secondary level, the biological impacts of puberty really kick in. Boys grow much taller, stronger and with greater cardiovascular capacity than their female classmates. For girls, the physical changes of puberty often create embarrassment and awkwardness; periods become a barrier to being active.
As if that were not enough, in mixed sport, girls simply lose the chance to win, to build self-esteem and even to have safe sport. Teenage mixed sport damages confidence and, worse, risks physical health. To safeguard girls, they must be offered proper female sporting opportunities. Differences in sporting performance and in strength between boys and girls mean that girls will not win races if they do not have their own. In team sports—football, hockey, rugby, cricket—it becomes a safety issue. In secondary schools, girls must not have to share their changing rooms with boys, including, if necessary, trans-identifying boys. Teenage girls must have privacy.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and I would like to introduce him to my 12 year-old daughter if he feels that girls cannot compete against boys at sports. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for giving us the opportunity to talk on such a vital topic. I can only stand here and admire the expertise in the Chamber.
To say that safeguarding in schools is important is like saying that it is useful to be able to breathe, so I assume that all noble Lords agree on this basic point. As, I believe, the only working teacher in both Houses of Parliament, I thought I would give the House my view of safeguarding from the trenches, as it were. I work in a very high-performing school in a challenging part of Hackney—which, incidentally, bans mobile phones. As Peter J Hughes, our CEO, wrote in his recent book on school leadership:
“Children in our Hackney community die. Children in our hackney community are often routinely stopped under Operation Trident. Children in our Hackney community are strip-searched and subjected to adultification in presumed places of safety. I am very aware that these are three very powerful statements, but they are true and they are every carer’s, parent’s, teacher’s, principal’s, CEO’s and community’s worst nightmare. It is something we cannot and will not ignore”.
It is against a backdrop like this that a school has get its safeguarding right. Safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility. This is repeatedly drummed into teachers, ancillary workers and students. A change of behaviour in the playground, a dirty shirt collar or a new pair of trainers can be an indicator of abuse or grooming. Every one of those has to be reported, for it could be the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Playgrounds are great places to spot how a behaviour has changed, a pattern has emerged, a gang has formed, or a student has been isolated by online bullying. This is the front line—the short-term reaction—but in fact safeguarding is more than that. Schools should be fun places where pupils want to learn and teachers want to teach, and can succeed in this only when we begin to get some of the 1.8 million children who, according to the Children’s Commissioner, regularly miss school back into regular attendance. On this topic, I ask the Minister to comment on the Children’s Commissioner’s call that every school should have a legal duty to report its attendance daily.
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Jenkin for securing this debate and all other noble Lords for their insightful contributions. Along with my noble friend Lord Sandhurst, I would like to share a few reflections on the role that safeguarding plays in an area that goes hand in hand with the educational setting, that of sport.
Safeguarding is at the heart of what sport embodies, ensuring fair play in a safe and fun environment. For “teacher”, think “coach”. For “pupil”, think “athlete”. For “parent”—well, they are irreplaceable. I declare an interest as a parent of children who are in school and take part extensively in curricular and extracurricular sport. I also sit on the other side of the fence, in that I am on the management group of one of our highest-performing Olympic sports. I am chair of one of our sports national governing bodies in the UK and sit on the finance committee of its international federation. Alongside performance, safeguarding is at the core of what we do. In the short time we have available, I will not be able to do justice to the vital work that UK Sport and colleagues in other national governing bodies are doing in this important area. Just last week, I attended its annual PLx conference and one of the sessions was dedicated to this precise topic: safeguarding in sport. Sarah Powell, CEO of British Gymnastics, and Andy Salmon, CEO of British Triathlon, are spearheading this on behalf of UK Sport.
One of the key concerns that all sports are facing, because of the complexity and jeopardy involved with safeguarding, is that coaches are losing the confidence to coach. I am sure that educators would say that teachers are also losing the confidence to teach. The issue is that all sports, whether dealing with adults or children—and not only those that have a robust regulatory framework to work within—need to become safeguarding compliant. We need to require minimum safeguarding standards for any sport, particularly those taking place in an educational or informal setting. Those of us involved in the governance of sport are committed to ensuring the highest standards of integrity, welfare and safeguarding across all sport. We are clear that anyone who does not want to abide by these standards is not welcome in sport.
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“Even more important than ensuring young people are learning well is ensuring that they are safe”.
Ofsted expects every school to have a “culture of safeguarding” and a school should be deemed automatically inadequate if these measures are found to be ineffective. Even though this occurs in a tiny minority of schools, Ofsted considers safeguarding to be an utmost priority.
What does this mean in practice? It means several things. Schools are required to work closely and co-operatively with appropriate local authority partners in a local community to ensure no child is able to slip through the net. They are required to adopt an “it could happen here” mentality, which works from the fundamental premise that every adult has the potential to harm a child. Safeguarding does not accept that simply because someone appears harmless, they can be considered to be so. Information sharing is foundational to this; schools are not in the business of keeping secrets. A teacher should never promise confidentiality to a child, and the Government provide six information sharing principles for child practitioners, including accuracy, security and timeliness.
Another vital safeguarding measure is the importance of parental responsibility. The law is clear that no other body is to assume parental responsibility for a child unless the court intervenes. Although there are exceptions, parents are accepted to be the most emotionally, socially and financially invested in the welfare of their children. Those who have parental responsibility for a child should be empowered to make decisions about that child.
We clearly have the infrastructure designed to make sure we keep children safe, so why are Britain’s children unhappier than ever? According to the NHS, in 2017, one in nine children aged between seven and 16 had a probable mental health disorder. By 2020, that number was one in six. In 2022, one in four young people aged 17 to 19 reported mental health issues. One in eight children report being bullied online through social media platforms. Our mental health services for children and young people are in a dire state, with children and young people’s mental health services buckling under the burden of demand. Do the Government have any plans to develop and implement a strategy to tackle mental health in schools?
Ofsted reports that peer-on-peer sexual abuse in schools is on the rise. Sexual harassment is prevalent in schools, and is more prevalent by boys to girls. This is unsurprising, given the normalisation of sexual violence in online pornography and the role it is playing in shaping a child’s understanding of sex and relationships. As the Children’s Commissioner reported in January, the average age at which children are first seeing pornography is 13. Some 10% of children surveyed first saw porn age nine. As I am sure we will hear later in the debate, the impact of pornography on destroying young minds cannot be overstated. Anyone who doubts this should look on YouTube at a film called “Raised on Porn”, which explains the effect on a child’s brain of watching pornography at an age when they are unable to compute what they are seeing. Age verification, brought in with the Online Safety Act, should go some way to resolving this, but the normalisation of porn consumption among young people is nothing short of a safeguarding catastrophe—although I am not, of course, blaming schools for this.
Social media and smartphones have become an integral part of the lives of children and teenagers. This is 24/7: no longer are children likely to be kicking a football around the school field or chatting in the canteen at lunch. Instead, they are disassociated from the real world around them, plugged into an online world with limitless boundaries and unfettered access to potentially dangerous actors across the world. As psychology professor and expert Jonathan Haidt put it, “Childhood has been rewired”. His research suggests that social media is making children more fragile, angrier and more likely to take offence. This is having a particularly damaging effect on girls, yet some schools still allow children to walk around the school corridors glued to their smartphones.
If the damage is so clear, why are we not seeing this as a safeguarding issue? I welcome the Secretary of State for Education’s pledge to issue guidance cracking down on smartphone use in schools. Can my noble friend the Minister say when this guidance is likely to be published?
As well as the proliferation of poor mental health, porn and social media, many schools are adopting an ideological approach towards sex and gender, and issues around identity. This is leading to a violation of trust between parents and teachers. According to a report by Policy Exchange, 69% of schools are not reliably informing parents when a child experiences gender distress at school and 25% of children are being taught that they can be born in the wrong body. As Dr Hilary Cass has said in her interim report into services for gender-distressed children and young people,
“social transition … is not a neutral act”.
Some schools are breaking the safeguarding rules by legitimising withholding vital information from parents, promising confidentiality to children and compromising single- sex spaces—most vital for both sexes in navigating the trials and tribulations of puberty.
Ultimately, schools risk usurping the roles of parents when it comes to navigating highly sensitive cultural issues such as sex, race and gender. Schools have an obligation to remain politically impartial when teaching these issues, but we know they are not always doing this. Statutory guidance exists but many believe it needs to be stronger. Can my noble friend confirm whether this guidance is under review and likely to be updated?
I am sure we all understand the pressures on teachers, who have an enormous responsibility in discharging safeguarding duties as well as providing an academic education. The way that closing schools during the pandemic has devalued the education system in the collective consciousness of the public has resulted in a sense that school is an optional extra, with huge numbers of society’s most vulnerable severely absent from it and parents willing to take children out of school for reasons such as politics and holidays. Will my noble friend consider enabling schools and academy trusts to issue fixed penalty notices for poor attendance?
Again, I do not underestimate the pressure that teachers are under, so is my noble friend aware that teachers are being called up for jury service with no concern about the impact on both them and the children they teach? Would she consider raising with colleagues in government whether teachers could be exempt from jury service during termtime, or guidance created for the courts to ensure teachers are not taken out of schools at critical times, leaving children untaught for lengthy periods?
Like many noble Lords, I hear from parents and teachers asking, “How can we let children be children?” For my generation—I think I am still just below the average age in your Lordships’ House—that is what we were. We read Ladybird books; we learned to read from Janet and John; our crazes, or our social contagions if you like, were potty putty, gonks and hopscotch. The most edgy thing we did in the break at school was to play kiss chase. That was about as extreme as it got. Thankfully, for my children’s generation there was no social media. I am not suggesting for a moment that people of our generation, and my children’s, did not experience bullying, violence and abuse, but thankfully they escaped the online world that children, their teachers and their parents have to navigate today. Quirky children are like quirky adults; they should not be bullied or picked on for being different. Whether it is for red hair, sexual orientation or being gender non-conforming, they should be supported to be themselves as they develop from childhood to adulthood.
I know that my noble friend the Minister will share all our concerns about the well-being of our children in schools. We cannot afford to drop the ball on safeguarding, even if that means admitting that mistakes have been made. Society is constantly evolving, and issues which previously did not exist, or may have been thought harmless or negligible, should now be re-evaluated in the light of safeguarding duties. Children deserve to be children and to grow and mature in school, knowing that they are safe from harm. They are already paying the price and it must stop.
I want to move on to the issue of sex and gender and self-ID for children in schools. Why do we have no adult agreement for what we want for our children on that? We do not have the legislative framework or the guidance which gives that secure framework against which teachers can make their decisions. The good we have achieved has been through guidance, legislation and adults agreeing what is best for children, which is not happening on whether children and people should be able to self-identify their sex and whether schools should support them.
While we are dithering about issuing guidance and wondering what we should do on this difficult issue, teachers are picking up the pieces every day in their schools. It is not just the odd school or one school in 10: these difficult conversations are taking place in every school. Children are growing up asking themselves these questions and teachers are trying to discharge their responsibility to help them without a framework to guide them. They are dealing with issues such as whether schools should have single-sex spaces in changing rooms, when a male pupil identifies as a girl and wants to access a safe space. They have to decide on sports issues, where weight and stature matter, so we have single-sex sports. They have to decide whether children can change their pronouns and whether they should advise a child to refer to a gender identity clinic. They even have to make decisions as to whether they should keep that a secret or talk to a parent.
I completely understand that this is not an easy issue for adults, but we should not leave it so that we create such uncertainty for teachers. Many teachers have their own views and are conflicted in what they should say to the children in their charge. Even where the national curriculum says something that I think is straightforward, such as that there are two sexes and children should be taught that in biology, some teachers now do not know if they should be doing that because of the lack of guidance and the advice they are getting. Teachers are dealing with pressure groups, which have opposite ideas to each other, and are essentially taking the legal risk. They are the ones at risk of being accused by parents of teaching things that they do not want their children to learn because, within adult society and government, the framework has not been presented to them.
For young people, growing up is a difficult time when your body is changing. We have been all through it—our children and grandchildren are going through it—and it is not easy. Many young people have a very difficult relationship with their body, but they should not be encouraged to think that changing their sex is an answer to those dilemmas.
Yet in the last 10 years we have seen the number of girls who have been referred to a gender identity clinic going up from 32 to 1,740, while the number of boys has risen from 40 to 626. I do not know why that is happening, although I have read the theories and I can hazard a guess, but I know that those children are in someone’s school and have teachers in charge of their pastoral and academic well-being, yet we are not giving them the guidance to make effective decisions.
My own view is that sometimes you think, “Well, let’s go for a halfway house and permit social transitioning but not”—as I think we will not do now, following the Cass report—“refer children for puberty blockers”. But, once you start children on that journey, you may cause them psychological damage. We also know that the children who are referred to gender identity clinics are statistically far more likely to have mental health issues or be on the moderate to severe autism spectrum. Also, children change their minds. Thank goodness they do—it is part of growing up—so we should not make them commit and then enforce that commitment so that it is difficult to change their minds later on.
It is not just the children asking these questions, wondering whether they have been born into the wrong body, who are suffering because of our lack of providing a legal framework; it is every child in the school. If safe spaces and sports are changed, every child is affected by that.
The last thing I want to say, as strongly as I can, is that guidance is needed, and I hope the Minister can say it is being issued today. As strongly as I feel about children not being encouraged to change sex, I feel equally strongly than children must be listened to, whatever they say and whatever view they express. They must be taken seriously and supported. They must not be bullied, no matter how they present themselves, and links with parents must be maintained wherever possible. I genuinely hope that guidance is issued soon, and that very quickly adults can give guidance to teachers on how they deal with the next generation.
Some 30 years ago, I held the portfolio for education and libraries on Cambridgeshire County Council. That summer, my new safeguarding responsibilities were brought home to me in a shocking case at one of the county’s primary schools. A caretaker had been grooming and abusing girls in years 5 and 6 but, when parents complained to the head, the response was, “No, no, our lovely caretaker could never do this”. But he had. As word went round the community, more and more former pupils and their parents came forward. The caretaker pleaded guilty, but many more children were abused because of preconceptions by those who should have protected them and investigated the first complaint. I tell this story because too often our own prejudices can miss something key that merits, at the very least, investigation and listening to the child. That is why over the years I have welcomed the strengthening of safeguarding.
School must be a place of safety for children. Sometimes that can mean safe from their parents too. One of the hardest things to do is to hear about or suspect child abuse or child sexual abuse from within the child’s home. Parents are not automatically involved in safeguarding reports regarding their children, as it is recognised that families are not automatically a safe environment for children, with some one in 14 children experiencing sexual abuse at the hands of their parents or guardians.
That is why we need mandatory reporting for abuse. Children cannot stop abuse; adults can. The 13th recommendation of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was for mandatory reporting, which would bring us nearer to the vast majority of other nations. A recent survey of 62 nations found that 80% of those participating had some form of mandatory reporting. Sadly, the Government’s response to the IICSA recommendations set out a very weak form of mandatory reporting. With no statutory offence for failing to report, it is not clear who will have the power to investigate or even to talk to the Disclosure and Barring Service.
These and other proposals are too weak to have any effect on reporting rates, so I ask the Minister why the Government are not following the examples particularly of Australia, Canada and others where adults in schools report that they are now more confident in raising suspicions to ensure investigation because of mandatory reporting frameworks. Mandatory reporting helps professional adults responsible for children by giving them a clear framework for taking action. By the way, this is not just a schools issue; it should cover regulated activities such as sports. We are seeing far too many scandals outside schools.
I turn to the safety of children who are LGBTQ+ and the proposals by some, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, to add a statutory notification to parents of any issues relating to their child. Experts say that creating an environment where a child is expected to suppress part of their identity is increasingly regarded by medical practitioners as harmful. Allowing exploration in safe environments away from predetermined outcomes—also known as “affirmative therapy”—is almost always beneficial. And by the way, if the child wishes to walk back from their initial feelings, they can do so without any harm. To ban it might cause further problems.
The Government’s own safeguarding guidelines, Keeping Children Safe in Education, say:
“The fact that a child or a young person may be LGBT is not in itself an inherent risk factor for harm”
and that LGBT children have protection from bullying and harassment under the Equality Act. It also says:
“Risks can be compounded where children who are LGBT lack a trusted adult with whom they can be open”.
If children and young people think they will automatically be outed to their parents, they may be less likely to confide in a trusted member of school staff, especially if they fear their parents having a hostile reaction. The NSPCC guidance on safeguarding LGBT children and young people states:
“You should discuss options with the young person and their parents or carers (as long as this does not put the young person at risk of harm)”.
In conclusion, the Government have taken some good steps forward on strengthening safeguarding and guidance, but we must find a way to truly protect our children and young people through strong regulatory practice and ensuring that we continue to put children at the heart of safeguarding.
Reference has been made to the Children Act. I pay tribute to our colleague, Lord Mackay, as well as to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, who I worked very closely with in her early days. She was a force on the Children Act. The Act has stood the test of time and I wondered why. I am able to share this. Every Government in every party have new initiatives, new programmes and new soundbites and, were the Government to change next year—which I think is most unlikely—I hope any incoming Government will not feel they have to start again and rebadge everything in their terms.
What is needed for legislation is consistency. The point about the Children Act is that an extraordinary civil servant, Rupert Hughes, had years of consultation with charities, local authorities and others, and took through the legislation. Then my job was largely the implementation, which was a lot of standing instruments and supplementary measures, again consulting with the same people. They had all been on the journey; they could see what had happened and would meet regularly together. In the health service, people despair because they think have found an answer and then the whole thing crumbles because of a new initiative or a new plan.
In praising those with whom I worked, I also really celebrate what is happening now. I greatly admire the effort and commitment at the Department for Education. Various themes come through. Social work is a wretched job: nobody thanks you for suggesting to a parent that they might be abusing a child. Nobody thanks you for leaving a child with parents who were abusing them. This is desperately emotionally draining and difficult and social workers are subject to ritual abuse whenever they get it wrong. So the work on the front line of trying to improve careers and support for social workers is fundamental.
Health visitors—the only people who legitimately can see children at home, take their clothes off and make sure they are physically well—play a crucial part. It is all about the early years. What did the Jesuits say? “Show me the child at seven and I will show you the man”. Turning a blind eye, waiting, delaying and hoping it will be all right means that damage goes undetected, unseen and neglected.
Of course, bringing up children is incredibly difficult. I see that with my grandchildren. I do not know how I ever was a mother; I probably was a very bad mother. My grandchildren have grandparents and uncles and aunts and a lovely place where we can go on holiday and be together. It takes a village to bring up a child—yes—but a lot of people do not have a village: they do not have a grandparent, a husband or a consistent neighbour. I simply cannot emphasise enough what we all need to do to help young parents cope. Margaret Harrison started Home-Start, a wonderful organisation. Lord Keith Joseph—the man who made me a Tory, for what it is worth—believed in the cycle of deprivation: that is what he talked about. What did he say about education? He said that the closest thing you have in education to a magic wand is the quality of the head teacher. That must be right. The responsibilities and the leadership they have are absolutely enormous.
I wanted to touch on mental health. It is a huge problem and we have to give it greater focus and understanding.
One-fifth of children leave school without even the most basic qualifications and too many are excluded. Education is your passport for the future: if you cannot read and write—and all magistrates like me will know the number of children in court who simply cannot read the oath—you do not have a hope going forward. We need to make sure that we give better alternative provision to those who are often slung out of school because they are an absolute nuisance and left to wander the streets. Those who need education most are getting it the least.
I want to commend the Online Safety Act, but I dare not. I would like the noble Baroness to have another debate on the subject, so that we can all say the things that we really wanted to say—but congratulations to her again.
without countervailing views, is the very opposite of safeguarding or good practice, which requires schools to maintain political neutrality.
Ideas must be introduced and then discussed in the round of their historical and political complexity. This is how lesson time on these highly vexed issues should be spent. We need young people to be interested in and well-informed about politics. Stating political positions as self-evident facts intimidates learners and shuts down debate. Can my noble friend the Minister inform the House whether guidance requires ideological issues to be introduced in a well-rounded and nuanced way? Is her department investigating how, precisely, children became involved in these school strikes, how they were made aware of and then joined public protests outside the school gate?
Similarly, is the department investigating how extreme trans ideology, which presents schools with significant safeguarding concerns, was allowed to be adopted as fact, when it too is far from neutral? Teaching children, including in early primary school, about gender fluidity further entrenches the sexualisation of childhood, conjoined as it often is with “sex positivity”. The fact of the legal age of consent seems to be ignored despite the key safeguarding reasons underlying it. Our zeitgeist is deeply rooted in the notion that the development of sexuality is indispensable to identity. This is not some fundamental human truth but the idea of Sigmund Freud. To quote Keynes,
“ideas … both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else”.
The education system should be a bulwark against pernicious ideas evolving into domineering and bullying ideologies, and not simply affirm both them and the young people persuaded by them.
I am not using the word “ideology” as a slur against a way of thinking that is simply different to my own, but in the Althusserian sense, that
“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”.
Extreme trans ideology states, “I am what I feel, irrespective of my biology”. It is the epitome of expressive individualism and detached from reality. I draw a key distinction between gender dysphoria, where sufferers and psych professionals know there is something wrong, and ideological dispositions held, for example, by bodily intact males who intend to remain so but feel they are female and aggressively demand to be treated as such. Schools should not consider themselves bound by the individual’s desire to have this imagined reality validated, even if parents are on board with it. Parents cannot dictate how schools are run for the sake of their child: a decision to affirm a child’s chosen rather than biological identity affects the whole school. Other children can feel or even be genuinely coerced into affirming an individual’s imagined reality. It confuses young children and stifles the development of older children’s critical capacity. Elsewhere, their education requires them to be led by facts and evidence, but in this particular area feelings trump all else.
The potential for harm to the young person who wants to socially transition is a major safeguarding concern. Social transitioning is the first step on the road to physical and pharmaceutical changes that will last their whole lives and are often deeply regretted.
I end where I began, with the need for neutrality. Dr Hilary Cass, as we have heard, concluded that “social transition” is not neutral but a major psychosocial intervention that may affect whether a child’s gender distress disappears or becomes long-lasting. In this age of affirmation, the ideologically driven imperative to be kind has blinded schools to their foundational safeguarding responsibilities. Will the DfE guidance make that clear?
It is a stated aim of all the sports councils funded via DCMS to try to get more girls active and to keep them active. Mixed-sex sport in schools undermines that goal. The ChildWise Monitor Report of August 2022 found a significant gender gap in access to sports. For example, only 33% of girls aged 11 to 16 said they play football in school, compared to 63% of boys. Single-sex sport is fundamental to fairness, to safety and to participation. Mixed-sex sport can have an adverse impact on girls, even in primary schools.
Let me quote one or two examples of what parents with primary school children have said:
“On sports day, all our races were mixed. No little girls won anything”.
“My daughter said, ‘what’s the point?’”
Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies MBE says she gets messages all the time from parents and coaches who are afraid to say anything publicly about this. School sports days are being made co-ed because they do not want the hassle of dealing with the trans issue.
I repeat that girls-only sports sessions are fundamentally important because they encourage participation. Those in authority in schools really must take this seriously and act to protect and encourage our girls. Effective safeguarding in schools includes and must include sport. This means recognising the physical differences of the two sexes and giving practical effect to what is needed.
As the Government’s guidance says:
“It is about the culture a school creates to keep its pupils safe so that they can benefit fully from all that schooling offers”.
That can be as simple as not setting an essay question like “A trip to the beach” or “A walk in the woods”, because a significant amount of children will not have experienced this and they could feel isolated. We are told not to celebrate the end of term because, for many children, school holidays signal the end of any structure to their life, including a hot meal, and a descent into chaos or just sheer boredom. For the majority, this is not abuse in the classic sense; it is just that parents and carers are too busy or distracted to provide more than the basics of life without any further stimulation or companionship.
Schools are where students can receive kindness, from their friends and teachers, and build and nurture relationships. Any teacher will tell you that it is the genuine connections with students that make them go to work each day. It is also about the environment of the school. The head teacher of my school, Rebecca Warren, always talks about the broken-window syndrome, whereby if something is left unfixed, be it damage or graffiti, more serious damage will follow. We underestimate the impact that school surroundings make on students; if small damages go unrepaired, then there is a sign of a more substantial malaise in the school. I think we also underestimate the subconscious effect on students that, if the school does not care about the building, it does not care about them. This is one thing that does not require much money, just organisation. The worry is that this could be another, as yet unseen, consequence of the RAAC saga.
Safeguarding needs to be baked into the curriculum and this is where Government and schools can do more to help changing behaviours in students, thereby helping from within. There are some lessons that need to be threaded through the term, rather than just saved for PHSCE, the once-a-term day when these topics are normally discussed. Many parents and children see this day as another Inset day, particularly those who hold beliefs that are challenged by the subjects studied then. Surely they are the students who would most benefit from a balanced debate on such subjects. Tender is a charity that uses drama workshops to provide a safe space where young people can rehearse for real-life scenarios and recognise what makes something healthy or unhealthy behaviour. By using this in drama lessons that all students study, say in year 7, all students can get a deep understanding of the issues. This could be more useful than a lifetime of PHSCE days, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s view on embedding more strategies for safeguarding and general well-being into the curriculum, rather than on drop-down days.
I have been trying to be as optimistic as I can around this subject and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, that things have improved. There are great stories of great people doing great work but, while there are so many children living in poverty, a school is limited to what it can do. I spoke to a safeguarding lead recently who said that if they were one of these children today, particularly the boys, they would be in a gang, for so many of them feel that it is the only way they can earn money, perhaps for their family or even for a new set of trainers, because they see no other way out beyond starting to carry packages for cash. My Lords, we have a lot of work to do.
We all know how important sport is to the nation, and particularly to children. Education is crucial to people’s mental health, as sport is to their physical health. I will not rehearse the arguments that place sport at the centre of our national well-being and our psyche.
At its heart, safeguarding is about the protection of people—in this case, children. However, protecting children also protects the adults who interact with them. The NSPCC Child Protection in Sport Unit’s definition states:
“Safeguarding refers to the process of protecting children and adults to provide safe and effective care”.
Governmental education institutions and sport national governing bodies need to harmonise. All international and national governing bodies have leadership roles to play, to provide and be provided with guidance and best practice, enabling convergence of policy and legislation.
This brings me on to a topic I have spent quite a bit of time on, albeit through the lens of sports governance: gender versus sex classification in sport. There are some simple concepts that I feel will help build an understanding of this sometimes complex and confusing subject. Gender can be fluid, with up to 107 identified to date. On the other hand, biological sex is essentially binary, determined at birth and known as birth, natal or assigned sex. There are further complexities in defining sex, so how do we, and should we, make sense of this complexity?
Quite simply, the key here is that within safeguarding, there has to be a protected characteristic. In sport, that is female, both from a competitive standpoint and in terms of social and environmental construct. The reason why we have biological male and female categories, not, erroneously, men’s and women’s—terms generally used in gender identification—is that females are considered to be disadvantaged physiologically. As we have heard from my noble friend Lord Sandhurst, even in amateur recreational sport, it is unfair and unsafe for them to play against biological males. Female sport, whether high-performance professional or recreational amateur, should be a protected category.
I know from personal experience what it is like for my eight year-old daughter—who, by the way, is no shrinking violet—to want to play football but to have to do so in a mixed environment where she is the only girl. Again, as my noble friend also highlighted, this acts as a huge disincentive for young girls to play sport. Trans activists will try to claim that this amounts to discrimination. My clear response to that, in the performance environment, is that trying to exploit ambiguities within classification in sport is tantamount to doping. It is a form of cheating. A person who is born a male, even if they transition pre or post-puberty, will always have a physiological advantage over a biological female. No amount of reassignment will change that.
There will always be differences that lead to unfair advantages. Allowing a biologically male trans person to play alongside natal females, unless all players consent, or allowing that person access to female changing facilities, are not safe practices. Consider when a male trans athlete causes a life-changing injury to a female player because of their vastly differing physiologies. Ask females what they feel about intact males entering intimate spaces such as changing rooms. They feel extremely vulnerable and possibly violated, and I suggest that if anyone allows this to happen, they are in clear breach of safeguarding and are promoting harm.
I am liberal-minded enough to believe that people should be able to express themselves in ways they see fit, as long as it does not have an adverse impact on other people’s enjoyment of life or, in this case, an activity in the educational or recreational setting. The key issue here is consent. People who are affected by an accommodation to allow a trans athlete to compete need to consent and not have it imposed upon them against their will by an ill-equipped governing body, or have the issue hijacked by extreme gender ideology and people with aberrant or criminal intent.