We give thanks that the most dangerous provisions of the Children, Schools and Families Bill were dropped by the Government on Wednesday, 7th April 2010. The Bill sought to make Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (‘PSHE’, which includes sex and relationships education ‘SRE’) a statutory part of the National Curriculum in England and to impose a licensing regime on parents who educate their children at home.
Thankfully, following much prayer, letter-writing, campaigning and lobbying by our supporters and those of other Christian organisations, the Government was made to abandon many of its key policies in the Bill in order to make sure it could be passed before the General Election. The Conservative Party is said to have put pressure on the Government to abandon the clauses that would have made SRE compulsory and both Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties were opposed to the home education provisions.
If it had been passed unamended, the Bill would have required all schools in England to teach PSHE to children from the age of 5 and to follow new Government Guidance and 3 principles in the way that those lessons were given.
The new Guidance would have obliged schools to teach children ‘the nature of civil partnerships and the importance of strong and stable relationships’ in addition to ‘the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and the bringing up of children’ instead of emphasising the value of marriage and the protection of children from inappropriate material. Power over the content of the sex education curriculum was to be removed from the hands of school governors and parents and put into the hands of the Minister for Education—or his deputies.
The 3 principles would have obliged schools to teach children a range of viewpoints on sex and relationships, not simply the one approved by their parents or the school’s ethos and to encourage ‘the acceptance of diversity’. The Government was to expect PSHE teachers to promote different kinds of sexual relationships and lifestyles as if they were the same—no matter what their consciences required of them. Even religious schools would have had to teach children how to access abortions.
The home education provisions amounted to a bureaucratic and draconian regime that would have discouraged all but the most committed parents from educating their children otherwise than at school. An obligation to register a home-educated child annually, together with home inspections and the ease with which a parent could lose the right to educate at home would have proved prohibitive. Together, the SRE provisions and home education provisions threatened to allow the Government to implant their own views on sex and relationships in the next generation.
The Minister for Education, Ed Balls, had proposed compulsory sex and relationships education for all children from the age of 5 last year, but had been forced into running a Government Consultation on the issue by disgruntled parents. When 68% of respondents to the Consultation said that PSHE should not be made a statutory subject and 79% responded that parents, carers and guardians should retain their right to withdraw their children from the lessons, the Minister was compelled to adopt an alternative strategy. He sought to justify the Government’s policy on the basis of a survey that it then commissioned in October 2009 of 1,791 adults and 1,661 parents. The survey asked some leading questions that were designed to secure answers in favour of making PSHE statutory and in favour of limiting the right of parents to withdraw their children from sex education. The Department for Children, Schools and Families then proceeded to introduce the Bill into Parliament and we are grateful that it has now been amended to remove its most unpopular provisions.
The Labour Government has vowed to re-introduce provisions from this Bill into another Bill this Summer if they win another term in office.
Andrea Minichiello Williams, Director of CCFON and the Christian Legal Centre, said: ‘This is a fantastic response to the lobbying done by Christians across the country; children in England have been safeguarded and the authority to decide on the sex education curriculum allowed to remain where it should be—in the hands of parents and school governors. We must continue to speak up on behalf of the right of our children to innocence and purity and we must make sure the candidates we elect to Parliament understand the importance of this issue.’