Oral evidence: PSHE Education and SRE in schools,HC 145, Tuesday 21 October 2014

Oral evidence, 21 October 2014.

Witnesses

Janet Palmer, Her Majesty’s Inspector and National Lead for PSHE education, Ofsted, Lucy Emmerson, Co-ordinator, Sex Education Forum, Heather Robinson, School Health Team Leader, Barts Health NHS Trust, and Carol Jones, Headteacher, Hornsey School for Girls, gave evidence.

Chair

Good morning and welcome. Thank you for appearing before us today and what a pleasure it is to have an all‑female panel as opposed to an all‑male panel, and I know my colleagues will certainly agree with that.

Siobhain McDonagh

We are working on an all‑female Education Select Committee panel.

Chair

I should point out, as we are being broadcast and my colleague has just arrived from sitting on one Bill committee, that other colleagues have been all sitting on various Bill committees right across the House since early today, and that and that alone is the reason why they are not in evidence sitting on the Committee today, for those who might have the misapprehension that MPs are lying in their beds instead of working long and hard, which is what they generally do. Last week, the Deputy Children’s Commission told the Joint Committee on Human Rights that mandatory PSHE education was needed as a means of combating violence against women and girls. Do you see combating violence against women as one of the purposes of sex and relationships education? Who would like to start? Carol, you are catching my eye.

Carol Jones

As the head of a girls’ school, I think it is appropriate that I respond to that. I am not sure it should be mandatory, because I think that it will be down to individual schools, their school governors and school leaders to identify what specific programmes need to be in place. Nevertheless, I think probably most of us in education would acknowledge that there is serious concern about levels of violence against girls, in particular, and an increase, in particular, of pornography, and the effects of pornography on young women. If I might draw the Committee’s attention to the Children’s Commission report that came out last year on violence and gang behaviour, you will remember that the Children’s Commissioner noted that young people say that pornography is everywhere: that they are awash with pornography, that children are affected by pornography and that their interpretation of pornography means that they have been mistaken in thinking that relationships are also pornographic. In that kind of arena, I think it would be incumbent on us all, as educationalists, to do something significant to improve the life chances of our young people and, indeed, the safety of our girls.

Lucy Emmerson

Equalities education is a thread that runs throughout good quality sex and relationships education and PSHE, and when it is taught well this is built up through the primary years and the secondary. Teaching about consent in the primary years is about teaching about consent to non‑sexual situations as well, and it applies equally to girls and boys. However, we know from young people we have surveyed who have finished their secondary education that about 30% had not learned anything about consent in their school SRE. We also know from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s reports that both girls and boys are growing up not knowing what rape is, and not knowing how to get help if they have a problem and need to report it. So, yes, I absolutely agree that good quality sex and relationships education will support girls and boys to have more equal and safe relationships, and the evidence shows that not all children and young people are getting this education, and statutory provision is required to guarantee that.

Chair

Most people can have a reasonable idea of what sex education might be composed of, but what about this relationships aspect? What is that?

Lucy Emmerson

It is learning how to treat each other as human beings. It is learning about friendships. It is learning about how to manage situations in the playground. It is learning about different families, which are made up of complex relationships, and that other people have different families from you. As you work through those steps in primary school, you are being prepared to manage the possibility of intimate relationships in your adult life.

Chair

Janet, how varied is the teaching of this, and is it effective in either combating violence against women or developing a healthy approach to relationships in the round?

Janet Palmer

We know it is varied, because we know that sex and relationships education is not good enough in about 40% of schools—about 50% in secondary and about 40% in primary, from our own inspection. We were talking earlier about protecting young people from violence, and SRE is a safeguarding issue. Whether or not it is statutory, safeguarding is a statutory responsibility of all governors and teachers in schools, and I find it difficult to see how safeguarding can be high quality without high quality SRE. Although we do not inspect PSHE or SRE as a separate subject anymore, we do inspect safeguarding and inspectors are asked to look at things like the extent to which pupils can understand or respond to and calculate risk effectively, associated with issues like child sexual exploitation, domestic violence, female genital mutilation and forced marriage. These are all issues that affect women. They affect boys as well, but many of them only affect women and girls. In our last report, we did express the concern that this lack of high quality, age-appropriate SRE in more than one‑third of schools could leave children vulnerable to inappropriate sexual behaviour from others, and also by themselves to each other as well, and to abuse. One of the reasons for that—and this chimes with the Children’s Commissioner and their report—was that some children simply did not know the appropriate language to use. They had not developed the confidence to describe unwanted behaviours. They did not always know what unwanted behaviours or inappropriate behaviours were, and they did not know who to go to for help. In that way, I can see what is an inevitable connection between safeguarding and high quality SRE.

Chair

Heather, do you have any remarks on that?

Heather Robinson

Yes. I am a school nurse in London and I work with young women who have experienced rape, sexual abuse and sexual assault. I see it first-hand; I get the A&E reports; I get the police reports. I work with these young people, and it can take a lot to convince a young woman that they were raped, because they just were not aware of consent issues and they do not have the language to describe it when they are reporting it to police. Like I say, I see first-hand the effects of young people who do not know about the issues around consent, and I do believe it should be mandatory and statutory in schools that information is delivered about relationships education.

Siobhain McDonagh

Janet, Ofsted reported in 2013 that sex and relationship education required improvement in over one‑third of schools. Is there any link, in general, between the statutory/non‑statutory status of a subject and its quality, according to Ofsted inspectors?

Janet Palmer

Ofsted has never expressed a view on whether any subject should be statutory or non‑statutory. That is a matter for Government as far as Ofsted is concerned. What Ofsted does argue is that all children or young people are entitled to a broad and balanced education—one that will prepare them for future responsibilities and experiences—and also that they should be safeguarded.

Chair

Your answer just reveals what a great question Siobhain’s is. It is not what your opinion is, but whether there is a link between whether it is statutory and the quality of the teaching that children receive.

Janet Palmer

If there is a link, the link would be to do with training. If because the subject is non‑statutory it does not attract initial teacher training, then there is a link, because there is definitely a link between high quality SRE and training. If the link is to do with the statutory nature of the subject, then there is a link.

Carol Jones

Schools are in a very difficult position with this, because most schools, we know, are teaching SRE. We also know that the delivery of personal, social and health education is patchy, and I think that is evident in Ofsted’s report. It is also true that schools have had to prioritise, under the accountability framework, subjects that are going to be judged or where schools are going to be judged. That is just a fact, and it is also a fact that schools have prioritised core subjects, like English, maths, science and so on and, possibly, EBacc subjects, and have tried to find ways of managing curriculum models that enable those subjects to be taught at the same time as good quality personal, social and health education, and there is a tension. There is a tension because of time, there is a tension because of curriculum models and there is a tension as long as you have an accountability system that gives priority to some subjects over others, which are obviously incredibly important because they affect the life chances of young people, but nevertheless are not part of an accountability framework. There is a difference.

Siobhain McDonagh

Would schools do it better if it were statutory?

Carol Jones

That depends on the quality of teaching. I had a very long conversation only yesterday with my head of personal, social and health education, who was an adviser to the borough on personal, social and health education, and citizenship. We both agree that the quality of teaching is what matters.

Chair

Would that be higher if it was statutory? That is the question. As you said, it is about deploying resources against an accountability framework. Would you deploy more effectively—would you find more of your CPD training budget to spend on it—if it was statutory?

Carol Jones

A long programme needs to be put in place where we do what we used to do, which is to train teachers to be outstanding teachers in personal, social and health education. That no longer happens. Most local authorities, in the days when there were local authorities that had advisers whose job it was to look at the quality of teaching of personal, social and health education and citizenship, encouraged CPD courses for schools across their boroughs and so on. Those teachers would work together, develop materials and so on, and in schools like mine and other schools that I have been head of we have always had specialist teams of teachers who are trained to deliver high quality teaching in personal, social and health education and citizenship. However, that system no longer exists across the country. As we know, we have a very diverse pluralistic approach to education, with a significant number of academies and chains and so on, which means that there is no cohesion and co‑ordination of the training of teachers for personal, social and health education. We would need to look at what we had done, which at some point, I think, did produce high quality teachers who were specialists in that area. They have gone, many of them, and many schools have had to resort to models that possibly they were not entirely happy with of having subject experts in other subjects delivering possibly weaker quality personal, social and health education, because it is a very complex area and a highly skilled knowledge base is needed to teach it well. It depends very much on the quality of teaching, and I think Ofsted makes that clear.

Pat Glass

In effect, what you are saying is a less than perfect situation is getting worse.

Carol Jones

I think so.

Lucy Emmerson

Could I just add that there were very good CPD—continuing professional development—programmes available over the past years? However, they never reached all schools and they never trained sufficient numbers of teachers to get every school having even adequate, let alone good, SRE and PSHE. One of the side effects of SRE not being statutory at the moment is that the turnover of PSHE teachers is very rapid. I consulted schools and they said that PSHE leads are often appointed as a side issue. It is not their main subject. It is because they have space on their timetable, and that is going to change next year, and their team will change so rapidly that, even when they get the good quality training, they do not stay to repeat and do that again the next year, so there is no consistency. It is a subject that requires a particular pedagogy, particular skills along with the knowledge, because it is different from some of the other subjects in the curriculum.

Carol Jones

Can I come in there? Many schools have tried to find ways of having outside organisations come and deliver aspects of personal, social and health education. One of the difficulties with that is that many of those organisations do not have the pedagogical knowledge to produce high quality teaching. It is very important that specialist teachers are in a position where they deliver those programmes and, as we have just heard, they are a declining group.

Siobhain McDonagh

If sex and relationship education is poor in a school, is there any evidence that it makes things worse?

Chair

We would be better off not having it, in some cases, than having poor quality.

Siobhain McDonagh

Yes, it does more harm than good.

Chair

Who would like to have a crack at that? Heather, do you have any thoughts on that?

Heather Robinson

I only know what we, as a service, deliver. I am not in on teacher planning.

Chair

Fair enough.

Lucy Emmerson

I would say that complete silence speaks volumes when it comes to sex and relationships education. Children say that about their homes as well: that if their parent refuses to answer questions about growing up, they realise it is a taboo subject—“I cannot ask questions; I cannot get help; that is the end of the story”—and I think the same is the case in schools. That is, if the school is censoring the subject, as we have seen to be the case, for example, in the Trojan Horse situation, where the sex part of the curriculum was literally censored along with some technical words in it, that is sending out a very clear message to those pupils that this subject is taboo: “I cannot talk about it. I am not allowed to ask questions about it.” It is not open, it is not honest and, depending on the quality of that bad teaching that it might have been an alternative for, I would say that silence speaks volumes. The alternative is filling that space with where else young people find that information, from pornography etc., which is probably worse than a teacher who is embarrassed but is trying really hard and perhaps puts on a video that is not the best quality. It is all on a spectrum, and we have a long way to go to make sure all schools are consistently providing reasonable quality SRE.

Siobhain McDonagh

Janet, the Sex Education Forum has found that 15% of schools teach SRE exclusively through “dropdown days” rather than timetabled sessions. Carol made some reference to that. How much of Ofsted’s concern about the quality of SRE stems from the method of delivery as opposed to the content?

Janet Palmer

It comes from both. The method of delivery, if it is just dropdown days, is part of the problem. Let us talk about primary schools to begin with. The worst examples are where the students get maybe a dropdown day sometimes in the last week of Year 6—usually in the summer term of Year 6, but quite often in the very last week. It is an external group, sometimes school nurses, sometimes some others, who will come in and speak to the children. That does not give the children any chance to internalise, to think about it and ask questions of their teachers. It also suggests to me a lack of trust between the teachers and the children—that the children would not feel confident and comfortable to talk to their teachers if they had any concerns, because they are not the people who discuss this sort of thing. I have one example of a primary school where they did not do any SRE at all, and when I asked them why, they said it was because their chair of governors was an elderly priest and they could not possibly discuss it with him. It goes back to what Lucy was saying about giving an impression that this is something we must not talk about and, again, in terms of a safeguarding issue, that is incredibly worrying. It is also putting, I think, the sensibilities of powerful adults ahead of the welfare and well‑being of children, and we have to be very careful not to do that. It sends out a particular message, if nothing else, when you are bringing in other people who do not know the children and whom the children are not going to open up to. That is my concern.

Carol Jones

I am not sure that it would be necessarily harmful, but as others have said, I would be concerned that children would go elsewhere to find the answers to their questions. They are so curious, of course, and I am particularly concerned about primary schools. If children are being exposed to pornography and images that are questionable, they seek answers elsewhere. I do not think there is necessarily evidence to suggest that poor teaching leads to anything particularly negative other than an absence, so that children have to go elsewhere to find the solutions.

Chair

What about the method? Siobhain’s last question was about how much weakness in SRE teaching was to do with the way it is taught as opposed to the content. Do you agree that dropdown days, for instance, are an inappropriate way to do it, for the reasons that Janet gave?

Carol Jones

Both are important, but I agree that if we have a tokenistic approach to teaching personal, social and health education and SRE, which could be delivered through only dropdown days or thematic approaches at the end of term, that does not provide the depth and quality of delivery that young people need to make sense of things.

Chair

Are there any other comments on methodology?

Lucy Emmerson

Young people have complained that SRE is often just facts, and that is the easy way to do it—for a teacher to learn the facts and just teach “these are the names of STIs; these are the facts about how your body works”. That, in itself, is better than nothing, but good quality SRE requires addressing children and young people’s attitudes and values and developing their skills, and that takes time. It requires the training and confidence of a teacher who has had a chance to reflect on the subject themselves, who enjoys teaching it as well and can go in confidently planning the lessons and managing the learning situation, not relying on somebody else coming in because they are too afraid to do it themselves, and not relying on a video because they would rather fill the space with something that does not come from them.

Janet Palmer

Developing skills is hugely important as well. It does not matter how much information a child has, a young person has or a young adult has if they are not able to use those informed decisions and enact those informed decisions because they do not have the confidence, the language and the self‑esteem to do so. Developing those alongside is really important, and that is quite difficult in a dropdown day from an outsider.

Chair

As a school nurse, Heather, what are your reflections on the way it should be taught?

Heather Robinson

Year 6 pupils go through a multitude of changes during that last year in preparation for going to a secondary school, in terms of the changes that are happening to their body during puberty, and by having it right at the very end of term many of those children have already undergone those changes. They have already been anxious about the things that are going to happen to them. My experience of something like a dropdown day is that often I am asked the week before it is due to take place. That suggests to me that I am an afterthought and perhaps the organisation of the whole day been an afterthought. It does not give us time to prepare.

Chair

What does good look like?

Heather Robinson

It needs to be a continuation. It needs to be age appropriate and the sessions need to grow with the pupils as they are growing and going through the changes, so the content is adapted on a spectrum.

Chair

If you were addressing, I do not know, a conference of primary school head teachers and you were laying out to them Heather’s vision of better PSHE and SRE in particular, just go into some specifics. When do you think you should first start and what would that look like? How much time would that require? How much of it would be specialists like you? How much would it be teachers being trained up to be able to do it? Just give us a picture of what good might look like.

Heather Robinson

In terms of delivery and planning, the school nurse needs to be involved at the very early stages of planning, so that we know when and where and what we are going to be asked to talk about. It needs to be in collaboration, so we need to be working with teachers. We need to know what teachers are trained and they need to know what we are trained in. We also need to work with the young people and the parents themselves, so they know. That is a lot of planning.

Chair

Does that happen in some schools?

Heather Robinson

Not in my experience, no. Sorry, I have lost my train of thought. I believe it needs to be something that has planning at the very early stages. Also, it takes a lot out of our time. We are very busy professionals, but we recognise that once we have delivered those sessions to pupils in a group situation we need to be able to provide one‑to‑one time afterwards. We need to be there if there are any questions that they are unable to ask in front of a group or any other adult, and give them that confidential space, let them know that we are available, so we are talking about perhaps a 1.5‑hour session, which would then become a day out of time. That is fine and we are happy to do that, but it is just giving us that time to plan and prepare our diaries in advance.

Chair

Thank you.

Pat Glass

Ofsted has identified good practice in PSHE in a number of schools, including faith schools, so if these schools can get it right, why can the others not?

Janet Palmer

That is a very good question, is it not? If these schools can get it right, then there are no excuses, as far as I am concerned. We have the example of the outstanding SRE in a Catholic secondary school, and that is all about excellent relationships between teachers and young people, and parents and teachers and young people. We are in the process at the moment of preparing another good practice report of a primary school in Stockport, where they have a lot of Muslim parents and they have an excellent SRE programme fully supported by all parents. That is because of the extensive amount of work they have done with those parents, and I am hoping within it we will have quotes from some of the parents, because I have seen some of them in parents’ evenings, saying, “This supports the work that we do at home with our children looking from the faith perspective at sex and relationships education.” Sometimes I think schools use parents as an excuse as to why they cannot do it. I hear that a lot: “We cannot do that work because the parents will object,” and we are hoping to show that that is not necessarily the case, and where schools really put the effort in with the parents, the parents go along with it and are very supportive and grateful for the work the school is doing.

Carol Jones

This ties in with the previous question on what good looks like. I think good PSHE looks like a specialist team with timetabled curriculum time on PSHE and/or citizenship, planned and evaluated by the specialist team with external agencies working with them. There was a time when some of us used to be able to organise that on a school curriculum and that would provide good quality teaching. It would also provide a good assessment structure. For example, in my school we used the English Language framework as a method for assessing the quality of delivery as well in terms of the progress that children made in their understanding and their learning. It would also help, if possible, to have assessed curriculum at Key Stage 4, so GCSE programmes in citizenship and so on. All of this leads to a change in the quality of teaching. However, what we also did that was most effective was to train all staff in the culture shift that may emerge once we delivered more PSHE. What I mean by that is Janet has talked about the importance of the relationship between teachers and young people. What we need to understand is that if we raise controversial issues in a successful way, then children will disclose more readily and there are larger safeguarding issues and, as a school, schools need to be prepared for that. That is why it is very important to train all staff and sometimes to have external organisations to come and support in the training of staff as well. I think that is what good looks like: when it becomes a whole school planning issue that is evaluated through curriculum design as well. That is a challenge for most schools now.

Janet Palmer

It is worth saying as well that, from our report, all of the schools that had good or outstanding PSHE and SRE had support from senior leaders and the head teacher; it came from the head and the senior leaders. In those schools where the head and senior leaders did not really value the subject, it did not stand any chance; it was not going to be good.

Lucy Emmerson

I would say that is exactly why we have to change the system and make SRE and PSHE statutory, because there are some excellent leaders. There are excellent leaders working in faith schools and all kinds of different circumstances where they have opened up conversations with governors and parents, and realised there is nothing to be afraid of and that parents will support this. They have started to train their staff and have good quality SRE growing year by year all through the school. They see the benefit, they feel it and they largely continue to do it, although they are facing pressures within the curriculum and other things. However, what are we going to do about those schools that do not have those good leaders—that are cowering and afraid? Something has to happen to move them, because it is not fair on the children who go to those schools if they do not get it simply because the leadership is not there. We know what good quality is. The SRE guidance 2000 made some very clear statements about some of the aspects of good quality SRE, and that is added to through the SRE advice, and yet it does not happen. It says in the SRE guidance 2000, “Children should learn about puberty before it happens to them.” Well, it happens well before Year 6 for many children, and yet schools across the country are still waiting for Year 6 and asking the school nurse to provide one session on puberty for children who are well into puberty already. That is in guidance that all schools are supposed to have due regard to, but schools are not doing it and the Ofsted report backs up that in terms of teaching about puberty, even though it is there in National Curriculum Science to some extent and there in the guidance, some schools are still not doing it. How are we going to progress and make sure that every child has that information about growing up and is not scared by what happens to their body, and does not feel that it is a taboo thing to talk about and ask questions about, and knows where they can get help—that they have seen the face of the school nurse and know that there is a place they can go to for one‑to‑one confidential help that they can trust? That is why we have to have something different now. We have to change what we are doing.

Pat Glass

Heather, of the schools that you go into that do it well and the ones that do not do it very well at all, what is the difference?

Heather Robinson

It is consistently the same schools that ask us to come in and do the puberty and hygiene sessions. We have had experiences of sessions being cancelled at the last minute due to pressure from parents or governors, from my understanding. We have experience of pupils being removed from the sessions, so they have not received the same health promotion sessions as the rest of their classmates. They are the things I am experiencing in terms of the puberty and hygiene sessions we offer. We offer many other sessions, such as healthy eating and dental hygiene. The uptake of those sessions, although they are not part of our core service, like puberty and hygiene, is much greater than the puberty and hygiene sessions. They would much rather we came in and talked about healthy eating and dental hygiene, and although we see them as very important, we see them as equally as important as puberty and hygiene.

Pat Glass

It is more than 20 years since I worked with a head who had lots of Muslim children in his school, and he was saying very clearly to parents, “No, I am sorry, the boys in this school will get sex education and relationship education.” Why are head teachers still running away from this?

Carol Jones

I do not think they all are.

Pat Glass

No, not all of them, I accept, but there clearly are some.

Carol Jones

I think it is very important to be clear on where the evidence is and the percentage of schools that are fudging this, because I am not entirely sure that there are as many as perhaps we think. My impression is that all the schools I know are teaching it.

Pat Glass

I bet some of the schools that Heather is talking about come out as “outstanding”. Do they, Heather?

Heather Robinson

To be honest, that is not something I have done any correlation on.

Pat Glass

There are schools judged as “outstanding” that are clearly running away from this. Right. Janet, some parents have contacted the Committee to express concerns about teaching materials for SRE being too explicit. How often does Ofsted come across this and how much of this is about the right training that goes in to support head teachers and staff in working with parents?

Janet Palmer

In our 2013 survey we did not come across it at all where we would say there were materials that were age inappropriate in that they were too much too soon. We did not come across that. Schools would tend to do nothing rather than do that. What we did find usually were materials that were too little too late—materials that were being used where children were asking these questions probably two or three years before and they were not being answered. However, we did not come across anything that we would say was too explicit for children who were too young. One of our concerns was in, I think, only one of the primary schools that I came across out of the 24, where the children were taught a simple mantra that would help to safeguard them, like “Do not keep adult secrets.” There is some superb material that schools can use that the NSPCC has produced, but very few schools seemed to have come across them or be using them at all. However, we did not see anything that I would say was age inappropriate.

Pat Glass

The Committee has received lots of anecdotes about bad practice in schools. We have heard a little bit about primary schools, and we have heard information about primary schools that are not teaching about puberty and yet there are girls already menstruating in school. We have had a teenager who contacted the BBC to say he did not learn about HIV in school, and yet this is a young man with HIV. We had a young girl who contacted us to say, “My school did not offer SRE classes until Year 11, when I was 15 going on 16, by which time I was pregnant, so it was too late. I was not allowed to take part in the lessons, because the teacher said it would not be relevant for me.” Carol is saying there are not very many, but how common is that, Janet?

Janet Palmer

It is difficult to say how common, because we are not looking at this universally across all schools. We do not really know. Local authorities would have been in a better position to have picked this up in the past, but they are not now; only a few local authorities still have a PSHE adviser, who would be able to find out this sort of information. However, the sorts of quotes that you are giving us are very similar to ones that we received as part of the PSHE survey. We did an online survey and, for instance, we asked them what would have made the lessons more useful and they said, “Something about rape culture,” and “What to look for in a healthy relationship.” There was a Year 10 boy who said he wanted more on the influence of the media, such as porn, on people’s views of sex and the human body. It is not as if young people do not know what it is that is missing. They do. You were talking about how SRE should be evaluated and about involving parents, the teachers and the community. I think you have to involve young people in those discussions as well in evaluating the quality of the PSHE. It has been a long time since any of us were 14 or whatever, and the influences that some young people have out there are ones that we may not have come across. Many of them will be the same, but some will be different, and we need to engage them in those sorts of conversations.

Lucy Emmerson

In fact, parents are not always aware of how much a child knows, because if there is an element of taboo around the topic at home they may be surprised by how many questions a child has, which can be unearthed, for example, through an anonymous question box or pupil consultation, even at primary school level. Children say, “My main source of sex education is watching One Born Every Minute, and it is terrifying and I see it on my own in my bedroom.” Schools collect that kind of information from pupils anonymously and feed it back to parents. I have seen this done in a Catholic primary school in Birmingham, where they had this process of focus groups with primary‑age children. They shared it with a group of parents who were interested in the subject and wanted to support the school. The parents were really shocked by how specific and accurate, but also misled, the children were from what they had picked up from around them. That made the case in that school to say, “Let us have a look at our programme. Where are we teaching this? What are we teaching, to what age?” They spoke to the governors and staff, and people worked together. In fact, by bringing in parents in that way, parents are surprised by other things. If they see how resources are used in context in teaching, very often they are much more supportive then when they perhaps looked online at a particular teaching resource and got the wrong end of the stick about how it might be used in a classroom context.

Chair

Thank you. Heather, is enough being done to support school nurses in delivering sex and relationships education?

Heather Robinson

We need to increase our school nurse numbers. We are there with young people; we provide that link between education and health. We are perfectly placed. We know what is going on from, like I say, A&E attendances, police reports, reports from higher case domestic violence; where they are discussed, we get the outcomes. We know first-hand what is happening. We talk to young people every day and they tell us what they want. We know that the Government has pledged to increase health visitor numbers by 4,200 by 2015 and that was started in 2011. Children are under health visitors for five years; they are under school nurses for 14 years.

Chair

There are 1,200 of you, I think, for 17,000 primary schools and 3,000 secondary schools.

Heather Robinson

Yes. We have 22 school nurses who hold a caseload covering around 42,000 children.

Chair

That makes the one‑to‑one sessions a little difficult.

Heather Robinson

Well, the thing with the one‑to‑one sessions is it is reactionary. For example, I have a young person who has gone to A&E, they have had a miscarriage, and they have gone in for sexual health advice. I then follow them up, because I have been made aware that they have already tried to seek help. What about the ones who have not gone to A&E, who do not know that they can use those avenues? I am not made aware of those unless they come to seek me out. If they do not know that I am available, they do not seek me out. If I am available on a Thursday but I am off doing immunisations in another school, I am not consistently there; they are going to lose faith that the school nurse is there for them. The British Youth Council report from 2011 says that young people want their school nurse. They want us to be readily available. They want to know where we are, how to find us and when they have used us they do really value us as a service. In our service, we believe that we need around a 20% uplift on operational staff, and we also think that we need some uplift in strategy, so to have a PSHE co‑ordinator within our service who can ensure that we have quality training, provide that link between the schools in terms of what training they have, provide multi‑agency training and ensure that we have good resources. We currently use a DVD around hygiene. It does the job, but it is older than me.

Chair

A bit like the guidance. Not quite.

Heather Robinson

There is nothing else available out there that we have found that gives children what we want them to have from the session. Although the increase by 4,200 is great in health visitors and although I have no first-hand experience of school nurses defecting to health visiting or being poached, I do know that when I was at university doing my specialist qualification to become a school nurse we had around 40 health visitors and there were about six school nurses. This year, there are two school nurses at my particular university and around 40 health visitors again. I know that people who may have considered becoming a school nurse find that there are no school nurse places in their trust or at the university, because they are being prioritised for the health visitors. Where we have people who may have wanted to go into school nursing, the opportunity is not there. I also find that we have a lot of people who want to come over from the acute sector into community nursing. They come for their interview and they just do not have any idea of what we do—and that is within our own profession. If our own profession is telling us that they do not know what we do every day, what about everyone else: our service users and our colleagues in education? There needs to be a real emphasis on working with students on career days and working with nurses who are already in their training becoming paediatric or adult nurses to say that school nursing is a great career.

Chair

It sounds like we need a Robinson commission into school nursing.

Heather Robinson

Yes, you do. No. I am just really passionate about it. I became a school nurse four years ago. I initially trained as a paediatric nurse and I worked in a very specialist area previously, and although I had that one‑to‑one relationship—I was making that one child somewhat better, along with a lot of other professionals—I came in to school nursing to really be a public health nurse, to work with a vast number of people at one time and make a difference in communities. However, the time that I am able to spend on doing that—one way I do that is with my immunisation sessions, but really I am working one‑on‑one with people who have already hit crisis point or are about to hit crisis point rather than stopping young people and children getting into that position.

Chair

To take you back to your 20% increase thing, where does that come from?

Heather Robinson

That is from me and my clinical lead. Like I say, I have been where I am for four years. In those four years our schools are increasing in size, so we have bulge classes; we have a one-form intake school becoming a two-, three- or four-form intake school. We have free schools; we have academies popping up everywhere. However, our workforce has not increased to reflect our increasing numbers. We have the massive increase in population through birth rates or through immigrating to the area, but nothing has happened to our workforce to reflect that. So, in talking to my clinical lead, we were looking at the number of pupils that we currently have, and it is around 2,500 to 3,000 pupils per school nurse, which is pretty much reflected in the RCN’s survey from 2009.

Chair

You are fairly typical in that respect.

Heather Robinson

It is fairly typical of the caseload numbers, but they are just continuing to increase and the workforce is not.

Chair

Okay. Do you have any more evidence around that and the 20% increase? The business end of what we do is making recommendations, but we would need to have an analysis to back any such thoughts in our report.

Heather Robinson

Sure.

Chair

Now, are there mixed messages from the Department of Health and Department for Education? Obviously you lie between the two. Do they mesh, particularly in the light of what we are talking about today, in terms of sex and relationships education? Are they on the same page or not?

Lucy Emmerson

One of the extraordinary things is that all Government Departments and all political parties have said that SRE is important. It is very clear in A Framework for Sexual Health Improvement in England from the Department of Health that the evidence referred to earlier today is referred to very clearly, and the need for every child to have good quality sex and relationships education, supported by home, school and family, is stated there absolutely. It is supported by the Home Office. The Department for Education has said that SRE is very important, but we need that leadership to extend. It needs to extend by guaranteeing that all schools in this current education system, where academies can do different things from maintained schools and where the National Curriculum does not apply to all schools, make that happen for every child. We are not doing it without legislation. We need to use the legislation to do it.

Chair

Well, we have finite resource. Heather has said that we should have a 20% increase in the complement of school nurses, with her academic lead. The alternative, which we discussed earlier, is to put more money into the training of teachers. I know it is not either/or and I know you would like a perfect world, but if you had to choose between the two, which is more important? How critical are school nurses to the effective teaching of SRE and how important is improved capability within the teaching workforce, in your opinion, Lucy?

Lucy Emmerson

A partnership is essential. The teachers are there in schools wanting to teach SRE. There are plenty of teachers who want to do SRE who want to get the extra training. It is very efficient to say that every school needs to do this and to do it at a better quality, because all we need to do is train those personnel on the ground. It is also efficient to work with school nurses, who can help train the teachers in some of the specific medical things that are out of the teaching sphere. That is an efficient use of school nursing capacity as well, in addition to making sure that every child has met their school nurse and knows where to go to get that help.

Chair

That was too sophisticated an answer for me, Lucy. I could not follow. If you were sitting with a budget line and you had a bit of dosh and you could put it either into extra recruitment of school nurses or some discrete boost to specialist CPD training in SRE for teachers and you had to choose, which one would you choose?

Lucy Emmerson

SRE is about the curriculum; it is about learning, and you need teachers to do that at a high quality, so when we are talking about the curriculum and SRE, we are talking about training teachers to do it.

Chair

Janet, does Ofsted encourage the use of school nurses in the teaching of SRE?

Janet Palmer

Yes. We have found they are essential to the school’s responsibility to provide good and bespoke SRE for all young people, which includes those with disabilities and special educational needs. They need bespoke SRE. It may be because they suffer from Asperger’s or they are Down’s or something else. In those schools that have drop‑in nurse provision, those children are getting good quality SRE. Where they do not have that, they are not, yet schools are responsible for safeguarding and providing that broad and balanced education for all children. It is entitlement for all, and without the school nurse it is quite difficult for some schools to be able to ensure that across the whole range of the children they have in their school.

Chair

Thank you. The bell reminds us how little time we have, so I will crack on. How far does the supplementary advice produced by Brook, the PSHE Association and the Sex Education Forum address the issue of the fact that official Government guidance is 14 years old? Also, Carol and Heather, do you use the new supplementary advice from those bodies and does it matter to schools whether the supplementary advice comes from the Government with an official stamp or from groups such as Brook and the Sex Education Forum? Who would like to have a crack at that? Janet, you hold my eye.

Janet Palmer

I think the supplementary advice is excellent. It is not easy to find, though. If you do not know where it is, you do not know it is there, and I have spoken to schools that have no idea about it and have never heard of it.

Chair

We know that only one‑fifth of schools are aware of it, according to a survey of NUT members this year.

Janet Palmer

I am surprised it is as high as that, to be honest. I tried to find it online, and if you did not know to go to Brook or the PSHE Association or the Sex Education Forum, you would just look for “supplementary guidance”, and even if you had heard of that it comes eighth in Google and is not easy to find. However, that is not my only worry. Even if it was sent out to every school, it does not mean that the teachers would have the skills to be able to apply it. We are still at the position where many schools would not feel confident to use it effectively.

Chair

However, you think it is pretty good and, if there was greater awareness, that would help.

Janet Palmer

I think it is excellent, alongside training to use it and the awareness that it is there.

Chair

Carol, do you use it?

Carol Jones

We do. Again, you always need a champion in your school and someone who is willing to co‑ordinate and able to co‑ordinate all of the information. It comes back to curriculum design, co‑ordination and partnership with external agencies, and the schools that make a commitment to working in that way will, inevitably, use it and use it well. However, we know that there is an issue with co‑ordination nationally.

Chair

Heather, do you use it?

Heather Robinson

I have only become aware of it as part of this process, and I am relieved—well, not relieved; it is not a good thing—that I am not the only professional who was not of aware of it prior to this process.

Chair

Okay, great. Thank you.

Siobhain McDonagh

Initially to Carol and Heather, in your experience how often is the parental right to withdraw a child from sex and relationships education exercised? How has it changed over time and what are the typical reasons for withdrawal? Is it important for parents to retain the right even if it is rarely used?

Heather Robinson

The right to withdraw is given to the teacher, and then we come in to do the session and are made aware that two or three pupils will not be present. Rarely have I been given any reason as to why, but pupils are removed from the session fairly frequently.

Carol Jones

I have had surprisingly few. I have been a head in Haringey and west London and deputy overseeing aspects of child protection and PSHE in Tower Hamlets and Hackney and have had very few, surprisingly. Where there have been requests for withdrawal, it has been around faith. Where parents have not wanted their children to have sex education or personal, social and health education in schools, it has been generally around faith—and a whole range of different faiths, by the way, not just one or two. Occasionally, it has been parents who feel that it is their responsibility and they do not want the school teaching their children. The procedure is that, if there was a request for removal, I would always meet with the parent and go through the curriculum with them, initially to try to put them at ease and to reassure them that there will be a balanced approach to whatever their children are learning, and there have been occasions where some of those parents have moved on and said, “Okay, I am willing to give it a go.” So, it is very few, surprisingly, and when they have arisen, it is because of faith beliefs.

Siobhain McDonagh

Could you put a number to it, say, on a yearly basis?

Carol Jones

At the moment, at a large school—1,000 students—we have not had one child whose parents have asked for withdrawal. In the previous year we had three in total, so very few.

Siobhain McDonagh

Okay, thank you. To Janet, initially, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child has complained that schools do not write to parents with enough notice about SRE lessons, can be misleading about content, fail to make clear that parents have a right to withdraw their child and make those who do feel awkward. How often does Ofsted find these things happening? How can the quality of the interaction on SRE between schools and parents be guaranteed, and is there a risk that statutory status would mean that schools would feel less of a need to engage with parents?

Janet Palmer

It is fair to say that Ofsted does not have a great deal of evidence on this. We have not done an exclusive survey of SRE since 2006, so the SRE evidence that we have is as part of the wider PSHE programme, and I would not be able to comment with any authority on that question, I am sorry.

Chair

In 2006, did you find any evidence that one of the reasons for limited use of the withdrawal was because of failure of notice, failure of information and preparedness to make people feel awkward for exercising their right?

Janet Palmer

I do not recall that coming through in the report, no. What did come through in the report was that the withdrawal was exercised very rarely. I do not know about the reasons why.

Chair

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Lucy Emmerson

Not all schools are confident about how to engage with parents, but surveys show that parents want to have a role at home and they want schools to have a role, and they want to have engagement with schools about SRE. Generally, if they have information about the SRE before the lessons, it gives the parents a chance to reinforce that learning at home. The schools that are doing really well with SRE have that open communication with parents and are having those conversations ahead of the teaching in school. However, schools are also confused about what they do and do not have to do and take different approaches to how they communicate with parents about SRE and the right of withdrawal. This comes back to the very confusing collection of legislation we have relating to SRE at the moment, which seems almost contradictory, with guidance that says one thing, legislation relating to National Curriculum Science but not to other bits of PSHE, particular bits of legislation about HIV and STIs, and bits of legislation about parents. What we need is clean and clear legislation that says, “All schools do this. All schools need to converse with parents about this and support parents in their role at home.” That would guarantee things for every child.

Chair

You anticipated my next question and have answered it, which was exactly about that. In evidence to our inquiry we have confusion at the highest level, forget the parents. According to the DfE, sex and relationships education is statutory in maintained secondary schools, and then we get the Sex Education Forum website saying that sex and relationships education is currently not compulsory in schools. If the DfE and the main expert bodies directly contradict each other, forgive the poor parent for being confused, and teachers, indeed. Ofsted, as you might expect, is sufficiently nuanced: “It is compulsory for pupils in secondary schools to have sex education, not SRE, that includes HIV/AIDS and STIs, and sex education, not SRE, is statutory in Science at Key Stage 1 to 3.” Of course, that is correct, but you would have to be doing this quite a long time to read that without needing to read it three times to try to get any sense out of it. Does anybody else have any thoughts? Lucy probably summed it up pretty well there, but what do we need to do to get clarity? There is confusion all over the place—with parents and teachers. No one knows what they are supposed to do or what their rights are, and it is a bit of a mess. Is that a fair comment?

Janet Palmer

Yes.

Carol Jones

I think we have to believe that it is important to effect some change, first of all, and there needs to be co‑ordination, and investment does need to be made in the training of teachers and in nurses. If we do not invest in that despite the difficulties financially that we all face, there is a great cost to society in terms of the sexual health, well‑being and safety of our children.

Chair

What are the consequences of the current lack of clarity?

Carol Jones

That more young people are gaining information from websites, pornography and misinformation from friends, and that is a worry.

Pat Glass

Carol, ASCL’s position is that SRE should not be statutory, but that seems to be out of step with everyone else that we have spoken to. The NUT, ATL, NASUWT and NAHT all think it should be statutory. In a recent survey of the NUT, which I think is still the biggest teaching union, is it not, 81% of their members said that PSHE should be statutory. The World Health Organization thinks it should be statutory. When I was travelling down here yesterday, I read an article in the Times—I do not know whether anybody saw it—on sexting, which I have to say is something new to me. I am only just catching up with that, but it was about the impact of sexting and pornography on teenagers. Did anyone see it? Yes. How widespread and normal it is surprised me—that it is absolutely normal behaviour and not seen as anything unusual by the average 12- and 13‑year‑old. I think it was you, Janet, who said it is a long time since we were 14 and that what is happening out there is very different from what we perceive is happening. Is it not time that we stopped worrying about our prejudices and principles and just got on with this, and told young girls and boys the facts about what is happening and the issues that you have been talking about, Heather, and that we make it statutory, we measure it—because what gets measured gets done—and we judge it properly? There is a lot of confusion. Let us cut through all of that and just say, “Let us get on with this. Make it statutory, let us measure it and let us judge it.” Will it make a difference?

Chair

Let us go to Carol first, because you were challenged on ASCL’s position.

Carol Jones

I was. My understanding is that ASCL’s position is not that SRE and PSHE should not be statutory because it should not be statutory but that it is so important that it should not be made statutory until we know that we are going to invest in high quality training and co‑ordination in schools to evaluate its success or to know that it is going to have some success. It is not that it does not want to do it.

Pat Glass

It is not against it, basically.

Carol Jones

No, it is not against it. It considers it to be very important and, indeed, we have been saying that we think sex education needs to be taught and teachers need to be trained for delivery in primary schools, for the very reasons that you identified. Those of us who are very aware of the influence that young people are having on each other through sexting and everything else, and the dangers that arise on a daily basis, will ensure and want to ensure that in our schools we pay attention to this. However, it has to be good quality. There is absolutely no point in introducing something statutory if we know that we are going to have poor quality delivery, so we have to think strategically longer term on how we are going to invest in the training of teachers, the training of school leaders, or the recognition that school leaders need support in looking at these issues, and in health service and so on. It is a co‑ordination issue; it is a structural issue rather than a resistance to statutory regulation.

Lucy Emmerson

One of the schools that I have spoken to recently said that back in 2008-9, when we all believed PSHE was going to become statutory, their school changed. They started investing more in teacher training themselves. They started to prepare for that eventuality of statutory SRE and PSHE. We can see that the promise of changing legislation will have a knock on effect and make schools want to invest more in partnership with national investment opportunities for teacher training. The two go hand in hand. Statutory SRE is needed to motivate the market to create initial teacher training routes into this subject and to provide ongoing good quality CPD. It also needs to be matched with some change within the Ofsted framework. We believe that the judgments around spiritual, moral, cultural and social development could be strengthened so that the safeguarding work in the curriculum is monitored by Ofsted through their reports, whereas currently it can be just a brief conversation, as one school said to me.

Chair

Thank you very much.

Pat Glass

Janet, Ofsted says there are insufficient measures of accountability to ensure that schools focus on PSHE education, and yet it will no longer be carrying out PSHE‑specific surveys of schools. If not Ofsted, then what?

Janet Palmer

Ofsted, like other Government institutions, has resource implications, and the decision has been made above my pay scale to have subject surveys only for the core subjects at the moment. As you know, Ofsted is currently undergoing a consultation about how we may inspect in future, and one of the questions is how we will be inspecting across the board, including issues of safeguarding, other subjects, etc. We are not doing it at the moment, but it is one of the subjects that cuts across so many of the other things we do look at when we are inspecting schools. When we are looking at SMSC—spiritual, moral, social and cultural—education, which we are statutorily obliged to inspect, and safeguarding, which we are obliged to inspect, it is very difficult to look at those without also investigating the PSHE curriculum. It is one subject that is looked at that is not the core, but it may be strengthened in future; I do not know.

Pat Glass

This Committee looks an awful lot of the time at the failures in the system, and we are constantly seeing issues around school readiness or failure of school readiness of children, the fact that people are having children far too young and they are not able to parent those children properly, and the impact of that in our safeguarding systems and in our school systems. I keep saying many of the parents of the children who we are looking at were a captive audience in schools three, four or five years earlier. If we got this right, would this not help wipe out some of those issues that we are struggling with and spending such a huge amount of money on later on?

Chair

We did examine that in quite some detail in the first session.

Pat Glass

Did we? Sorry, I was in a Bill committee. I was dragged out of a Bill committee to come here.

Janet Palmer

Yes, it seems sensible that it would.

Lucy Emmerson

Threads like equalities and safeguarding run through what schools do—it is their business—but it has to have a space in the curriculum to really have an impact.

Pat Glass

Finally, a killer question, I hope: would it not help focus schools’ minds if this was an exam or a qualification? It comes back to what gets measured gets done. If there was a qualification in this—if this was a GCSE or one of the EBacc subjects—would we not be a whole lot better at this?

Carol Jones

Definitely. I say, as a school leader, that we have to make hard choices in our curriculum time, and we have prioritised those subjects that are beneficial for the life chances of young people—i.e. they contribute towards progress into A Level or university and so on or, indeed, apprenticeships. It is not insignificant, it seems to me, that Ofsted has done the same thing and now undertakes subject inspections on those subjects. So, yes, and I certainly know that in schools like mine and my previous school, where there was a GCSE in Citizenship and the entire Key Stage 4 student cohort took it, it had high status. It was well studied; the teaching was outstanding consistently. So, yes, it would make a difference.

Pat Glass

It would make a few lives better.

Carol Jones

It would make a few lives better, yes.

Lucy Emmerson

I am not sure that the possibility of having an exam will force a school to provide the subject. The decision still has to be taken by the school to say a subject is important enough to put the exam there for, and I think it will be those schools that are already committed to SRE that will say, “Let us have an exam and get something out of it as a qualification as well.” You have to put the statutory SRE and PSHE in place first, and we might see qualifications of all kinds coming out of that and flourishing in that environment.

Chair

Will that necessarily work? You are obliged to have an act of worship and lots of schools do not bother. There are all sorts of things that schools are obliged to do that they do not, so is the idea that just because you make this statutory and magically everyone is going to take it seriously and do it well not a bit naive?

Lucy Emmerson

It has to come. Schools and experts have said to us for years that we need it to be statutory to change something. I have had local authorities say, “We have been trying to make change for 13 years, but some schools are confused and are not strong in this, and we need something to move things forward.” Of course, there are three elements to this. There is statutory, there is teacher training and there is some form of accountability, and I think there is scope within the Ofsted framework to improve that.

Chair

It is the easiest lever to pull, is it not? If you are looking around for something to recommend, like when we are doing an inquiry like this, you are looking for something nice and concrete: “Ah well, if we make it statutory, problem solved,” and often, even though there is so much evidence, a lot of things that are in the same status are not solved by any means.

Lucy Emmerson

It is a package.

Pat Glass

There are certain triggers in education. If I wanted head teachers at a meeting, I would put “Finance” on the agenda and they would all turn up, because it is the thing that makes things happen. I am not saying it would happen with every school. Some schools would take a judgment on their children and their school and whatever, and choose not to do it, but surely some schools and some head teachers would decide to make this a higher priority if there was an exam.

Janet Palmer

I do not think a GCSE would necessarily mean, though, it would meet the needs of the children in that school. It would depend very much on what that GCSE looked like and what was in it.

Pat Glass

Surely it would meet their needs if it was there; at the moment, it is not.

Janet Palmer

A good PSHE programme is being developed. We have talked about the children knowing what the issues are out there, and in some schools they are very different from others. In some very middle class girls’ schools anorexia is the problem, not smoking crack cocaine or gang culture; in some it is tanning shops; in others it is taking steroids for boys. It is very different depending on the situation in the school, and a GCSE would have to be flexible enough to be able to meet those needs that a good PSHE programme would do within a school.

Chair

Is that not also an argument against making it statutory for precisely the same reason?

Janet Palmer

No, I did not hear anybody argue for a statutory that crossed every “t” and dotted every “i” and said you had to do exactly these very things, but within that, even if it is statutory, there ought to be flexibility.

Chair

It becomes a compliance thing if it is statutory, and the tendency would be to tick the boxes. There is a risk of that, is there not?

Janet Palmer

There is a risk of that, and that needs to be considered within the argument about it becoming statutory

Chair

Okay. Can I thank you all very much indeed for giving evidence to us today? If you have any further thoughts, particularly around recommendations, please do be in touch. Thank you very much indeed. Oral evidence: PSHE Education and SRE in schools, HC 145 2