Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Education – in the Senedd at 1:37 pm on 7 March 2018.

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Photo of Michelle Brown Michelle Brown UKIP 1:37, 7 March 2018

Thank you for that answer, Cabinet Secretary. 

Parents, particularly of preschool children, are understandably going to be concerned about what the content of the SRE curriculum is going to be. There are going to be parents who, for religious reasons and various other reasons, may find the content of the curriculum unpalatable. So, I suppose my final question has two parts to it really. How much input are parents going to have into the new curriculum and if a parent—. Sorry, that's my question: how much input are parents going to have into that curriculum?

I'm still uncomfortable with this thing—that you don't want to say whether parents are going to have the right to opt their child out, because the ultimate ability for a parent to opt their child out of a part of the curriculum that they don't like is to withdraw their child from the school and home school the child. That's going to have a detrimental effect, particularly on women, who are going to be left looking after the child when, otherwise, they could have been in schools. So, how are you going to get round that?