Children and Bereavement

Monday 2nd December 2024 Westminster Hall

15:39

[Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petitions 636718 and 624185 relating to children and bereavement.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. This is my first time opening a debate as a new member of the Petitions Committee; I am delighted to speak to the two incredibly important petitions. Before I begin, I want to thank the House of Commons staff for enabling me to engage proactively with the petitioners, charities, advocates, representatives and supporters involved in both petitions. I feel privileged to stand here today as an advocate for the campaigners who have worked tirelessly for years to get results on these vital matters. This debate takes place during National Grief Awareness week, which is run by the Good Grief Trust, who chose this year’s theme: shine a light. That is exactly what I hope to do today in this debate.

First, I would like to set out the two matters at hand before I make the case for each. Crucial in all of this is that both petitions go hand in hand in with the same diagnosis and cure, which I will describe. I will delve into it further towards the end of my speech. I want to start with the petition entitled, “Record the number of bereaved children to ensure they are supported”. That might not be something we would consider every day, but currently we do not know how many bereaved children there are in the UK right now. The petition argues:

“If we don’t know the true scale of childhood bereavement, the services that exist to help are unable to proactively offer the support that children and their families need to cope with their grief. Without support, unresolved grief in young people can lead to an increased risk of youth offending, family breakdown, underachievement in education and employment and long-term mental health conditions.”

I want to thank Winston’s Wish and its inspiring ambassador, Mark Lemon, for the work that they have done submitting the petition and campaigning for it over the years. One of the fundamental reasons why I am in favour of it is Mark’s own personal story, which I am deeply grateful to be able to share on his behalf today. At age 12, Mark experienced the horrific murder of his father. With nothing registered and no real support around at the time, Mark received no help to cope with that traumatic incident or adjust to the massive impact that the loss had on his life until his 20s. Mark is here today, and he argues that recording the number of children in the household when a death is registered could help thousands of bereaved children and ensure that services can better plan, reach out to families and offer much-needed support. Mark is working hard to make sure that no child faces the isolation he did after such devastation, which is hard for any of us to fathom even as adults.

Setting aside the emotional aspect of the argument, I support the practicalities of the proposal. From service delivery to charities, local councils and schools, how can anybody work to tackle the consequences of childhood bereavement if no one knows where it is occurring in the first place?

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

I concur exactly with everything the hon. Member has said. It is a cause close to my own heart. In fact, I have a private Member’s Bill on this very subject due to be considered in July. Does he agree with me that this is something the Government should look at and help to happen, because it should not need legislation?

[Kevin Bonavia]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. Obviously, there are things that can be done through law. There are things that are done through good practice and guidelines, and I am sure we will hear from my hon. Friend the Minister in due course as to what can be done. If it needs legislation I am sure she will consider that, but we should do all that we can to encourage the Government to take whatever steps they can to help achieve the aims of the petitions.

On the first petition about collecting data, a simple change would be to support registrars to collect the data when a death is registered while protecting the anonymity and data of the family. That seems achievable without being overly invasive. After all, it would simply be an option, and it would indicate where bodies need to target their support. Winston’s Wish, the child bereavement charity, has regular get-togethers with young people so they can share their stories of grief with one another. Imagine how that data could transform where it allocates its resources, time and effort. It could be transformational for our kids.

From speaking to colleagues across the House, including the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine), who brought a debate on this subject to Westminster Hall earlier this year, it is clear that such a move could attract cross-party consensus. I therefore ask my hon. Friend the Minister what legislation would be needed to enact the change permitting registrars to collect data on the number of bereaved children at the point of registering the death. If enacted, what support and training could be given to registrars so they can direct families who register bereaved children towards charities and bodies that can help?

The previous Government essentially said, “We won’t do this, because it is not the done thing,” and pointed people towards the support that schools and charities can give. Let us make it the done thing, because it would help schools and charities to do their jobs in the first place.

The second, and equally important, petition argues that we should add content on death, dying and bereavement to the national curriculum. It states that, under compulsory relationships education, schools should be required to provide age-appropriate education to help children understand death as a part of life:

“Talking about death can be helpful for children and issues of bereavement should be compulsory learning for children in preparation for life as an adult. Children are taught how life begins through the national curriculum and similarly we should not hide from equipping children with the skills to comprehend death. Children must be provided with the skills to comprehend loss and to prepare for the emotions and feelings that accompany a bereavement which at some point, we all have to face.”

I commend the research, testimony and briefings from the childhood bereavement network and the National Children’s Bureau, which have compelled me, emotionally and logically, to support these changes. I also want to highlight the work of the petition creator, John Adams, past president of the National Association of Funeral Directors, whose membership includes more than 4,000 funeral homes. He has used his story of grief as a young child as a motivator to call for these changes, which will help all other children in need.

[Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)]

On that point, I want to give credit to my constituent, John Adams. He did not let the death of his mother, Maria, hold him back in life. He was determined to see change, and he should be championed for all the work he is doing.

[Kevin Bonavia]

I wholeheartedly agree, and I commend John and others who have used their experience to help other people. There is nothing better than a person’s own experience for reaching out and supporting people.

Every day, an average of 111 children in the UK lose a parent. After charities, schools, local authorities and family members and friends have stepped in, how many of those children fall through the net and have no one to talk to or cope with? Our job is to level the playing field. Not everyone has a fantastic teacher who goes the extra mile, working within parameters of the curriculum, which could allow the teaching of bereavement through links to other topics, such as the family. Not everyone attends a school that has a bereavement policy or a pastoral support team that identifies and supports bereaved children. Not everyone has access to a phenomenal organisation such as Winston’s Wish or Stand-by-me in my constituency of Stevenage—a local childhood bereavement service that launched a “Contact-me” bereavement programme, which offers a whole-school approach to supporting bereaved students. Stand-by-me now has children who have experienced bereavement as young ambassadors. For example, Evie received support from the charity and has helped three other children in her class with similar experiences. There is nothing like the peer-to-peer support of a person who helps somebody they know who feels the same way as them. I thank Evie and the many other children like her who support others in the same situation, but not everyone has a network of family and friends who can step up and find out how to get the right help.

Let us stop the postcode lottery and bring grief education into the school curriculum. That will guarantee that at least one effort is made with every child across the country to break the stigma of bereavement. It will foster healthy discussions about what has happened and what is to come, and make those affected feel that they have a network of support they can access safely.

I do not believe bereavement education would add a burden to already pressurised schools and staff, because as I have learned in the past few weeks, resources from all the organisations I have spoken with on the petition are ready to do the job. We must be proactive, not reactive. We should not take the risk that a single child in 10 years’ time will tell a story like Mark or John’s. I ask the Government, what is the latest guidance following a recent curriculum review? Can bereavement education be included if that is not already the case? The previous Government left the matter up for review, stating that it could be taught in school if schools wanted that. No more “could”; let us move to “should”, or even “must”.

I want to end where I started. The matters in the two petitions are inherently linked, one perfectly complementing the other. With a register for who needs support, alongside the guarantee of intervention in our schools, we will be making an active choice to see all the invisible bereaved children in the UK today. Let us turn isolation into embrace, and do whatever is possible to enshrine both petitions in law and practice as best as we can.

16:41

[Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris, and to follow the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia), who opened so eloquently, setting the tone for what is an important debate.

Benjamin Franklin said that nothing is certain in life except death and taxes. We certainly spend enough time in this place discussing taxes—as I am sure we will do later this week—but not enough time discussing death. We even try to educate children and young people about taxes and finance, but we do not do that with death at the right level in the national curriculum. It is a subject that many find hard, so the easiest way to deal with it is to not talk about it.

I pay tribute to John Adams, who is in the Public Gallery. He is a funeral director from Bridgnorth in my constituency. He has been a champion for adding death, dying and bereavement to the national curriculum, and he has done tremendous work. John is leading that work both nationally and internationally, and I believe he has been asked to go to Australia next year to speak there and help them. What we are doing here is pioneering, and that is good to see.

John has worked within the industry on this issue as the president of the National Association of Funeral Directors, as well as with Child Bereavement UK. There is an excellent video of John being an ambassador for The Good Grief Trust, where he shares resources to support education on the subject. He is also working in the education sector, as well as with many other organisations. He is certainly spending time doing everything he can, and it is to his credit that we are here today to speak about the subject.

John is committed to making the necessary changes to get the best outcomes for children, young people and their families—it is important to remember the families—when dealing with death and grief. That is no small thing; it is not an easy topic to pick up and run with. I was delighted to speak to John, who is one of my constituents and pioneered one of the petitions behind this debate. During our conversation, John told me of his personal experience of losing his mother Maria when he was 12. For John to pick himself up, not let life get him down or stop him talking about it, and decide that other people should not have to go through his experience, is excellent. Maria is the reason we are here today, so I give credit to John for the work he has done.

John told me that adding a standalone provision for grief education to the national curriculum will strengthen families when they need it most. It will improve resilience in school communities, and mitigate the impacts of bereavement as an adverse childhood experience. It builds on recent research that shows that children who are educated about grief before a traumatic experience can discuss grief and have less anxiety about the death. I know that from personal experience. My father Samuel died when I had just turned eight, and my mum was left alone with my two younger brothers and me. My father was only 37, and it happened in the school holidays. I remember going to school later in the day, because the teacher had to tell my class, “Stuart’s dad has died. Nobody mention it to him.” That was how it was dealt with. Even with the teachers and the children, nobody knew what to say. My friend told me what the meeting was about and what had been said, but nobody discussed it. If I misbehaved it was put down as, “Oh, he’s lost his dad—don’t say anything,” or, “How can we leave Stuart out?” If something went right or wrong nobody knew how to deal it, from the teachers to the students.

It was almost as if the event had never happened, and it was through other circumstances—I have spoken about this in the main Chamber—that I discovered the impact that it had on me. It took me many years to deal with it myself, but if I had had that education and awareness, and it could have been spoken about openly.

[Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)]

I worked as a mental health nurse in the NHS for many years and saw many people struggle with their mental health due to traumatic experiences, including family bereavements that happened many years ago, and they were never able to deal with it. Does the hon. Member agree that not addressing traumatic episodes at a younger age can lead to long-term damage to people’s mental health later in life?

[Stuart Anderson]

The hon. Member makes an excellent point. I agree 100%, but it is not always a single significant point. I lost my dad at eight, and I was shot at 17 in the military. For me, it was a culmination of different things. I have spoken openly about how I ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder, with all those different things, and spent 15 years living a nightmare, wanting to take my own life. All those things had built up, but if we deal with children’s mental health earlier—it is really hard to deal with—there is a way to come through. The way to do that is to grieve at the time, and to talk and discuss it.

I do not think that the weight of that should just fall on the parents. The school should support and work with them, because the children are at school for a long time. It is not just me, John and others who have commented on this. This goes across South Shropshire—the old constituency was Ludlow—as we have almost 2,000 signatures, so I know how important this is locally, and all the credit goes to John, who has been raising awareness of the issue.

As we are here to speak about these experiences, the previous Government launched a review about whether bereavement content is needed in statutory guidance, and pledged to consider the points made in the petition. The consultation ran until 11 July. The general election was called before it finished. I ask the Minister whether her Government can take up the work that was begun and look at putting this into the national curriculum, so that when other children face this—because they will—they have the right support. People will know things from other children in the class and that can teach us how to deal with this. It is not resource intensive—it could run alongside relationship, sex and health education or something similar—and it is not a financial burden. Investing time in the children, as the hon. Member for Stevenage said, will save far more time by dealing with things that become problems further down the line.

Having personal experience of this, and having been inspired by the work that John has done for all these years as a voice, not just in the UK but internationally on such a hard and difficult subject, I fully support what he is doing to put it in the right context. I urge the Minister to align with me and look at how we can put this back into the national curriculum and honour the work that John has done after losing his mother Maria all those years ago.

16:49

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. It is a privilege to be part of a debate that reflects Parliament and politics at its best, which happens when we see the injustices and the suffering that have befallen those whom we represent, and we seek to make sure that they never happen again.

I start by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) for eloquently opening the debate, to Mark and John, and to the hon. Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson). Time passing does not make it easier for them; it makes it more important that we have not yet dealt with the situation that they are in. I am grateful to have heard about their experiences and to contribute to this debate with those experiences at the centre. We are speaking for thousands of people in this country, of all ages, who have lost a parent.

In my short contribution, I will raise with the Minister some examples that I have dealt with as a constituency MP. They are the cases that nobody ever wants to see. When a young child comes through our door in that position, it takes all our courage not to burst into tears when we hear their heartbreaking story, but that becomes even more of a challenge when we realise that services are not built to wrap around them. It seems so obvious that we must do everything we can for this young person, because an awful thing has happened to them, but that is not a given.

Sadly, I have dealt with several children who, as Mark lost his father, have lost their parents to murder—horrific, public murders in my local community. It seems obvious that those children would be traumatised. One child was there when it happened, but we are still struggling to get them counselling; it is not a given. The school does not have any understanding of what needs to provided. That does not mean that people at the school do not want to help, but it is so out of their worldview that that could happen, so counselling is not in place. The family have been trying to push for it for some time, but it is still a work in progress. Ironically, we have now discovered that a child can get counselling if they view a murder or are a witness, but not if it has just happened to a member of their family or to a parent.

This petition tells us about the need to recognise that children are traumatised in that way—they are traumatised by the loss of a parent whether they see it or not—so we must get counselling in. That seems so obvious, but it is not consistent. The counselling services are there, so it is a question of joining them up. I hope that the Minister can take that back to her Department.

I have also seen, for children who have lost parents to terminal illness, that counselling is not an expected part of the conversation about what we can do. It has come up only in relation to whether we can keep the child in school, but that seems too late. I would wager that the hon. Member for South Shropshire feels that, in his experience, one reason he got to that point was that nobody intervened early enough; indeed, they tried to stop the conversation rather than recognise how traumatic it would be for him. It is therefore not just about providing counselling when something horrific has happened, but about recognising how horrific it is to lose a parent at such a young age—full stop. That would make a real difference.

[Stuart Anderson]

The hon. Member makes an excellent point. Even in the Ministry of Defence, the UK armed forces have recognised that an annual MOT of mental health to discuss death, dying and bereavement, and their impact, gets a far better performance out of the soldiers who will face them. Why on earth do we not have that discussion earlier in schools too?

[Ms Creasy]

One of the reasons it is important to have counselling in schools is that, when I think about the partners who I have worked with who have lost somebody, we want to try to take as many burdens off their shoulders as possible and recognise that they are dealing with grief too. This debate focuses on children, but there is a need to join up the welfare system to support families. They have lost somebody—they have lost an income provider—and often, the time that the remaining parent wants to spend with their child is taken away because they have to work to try to make up the loss of income. We should be able to join that up.

I first became involved in many of these issues when I worked with the brilliant Widowed and Young with parents who were not married, where the impact was that families would lose an income provider who was not recognised. The children were clearly suffering, but in those cases the mums, and in one case the dad, were having to think about all the practical things, such as bills and how to keep a roof above their head. They did not have as much time to be with their children, which in itself caused grief and harm to them. We managed to get the allowance for bereaved widows extended to non-married partners, but we did not really look to challenge the idea that somehow, after 18 months, a child and a family should have recovered to the extent that there would be no impact. That affects our ability to help children.

There is another scenario I want to raise with the Minister, which addresses the first petition about data. I recently had a case that really floored me, of two children who lost their mother and then, shortly afterwards, their father—it was just extraordinary. We relied on their family members to help them, but because those family members did not have immigration status here in the UK, the children, who were British citizens, lost all their rights and were living in absolute, abject poverty. My community in Walthamstow brilliantly picked them up to try to help them while we resolved their immigration status, but the children’s rights here were gone as soon as their parents died. It got me thinking about how many other families might be in that position.

I asked the Ministry of Justice about children who have legal guardians, because that was what these family members had become for those children. It was sorting out their status that then opened up doors for the children, which took far too long—more than a year. We do not have a record of how many orphans are in this country. Think about the worst thing that could possibly happen: someone loses one parent and then the second, or maybe even loses both together. The state does not know how many of those children there are, so I asked the Ministry of Justice about the numbers of children being allocated a legal guardian because both parents had passed away. The Ministry of Justice told me, in answer to a written question, that while it thought that the information was held in court records, it was not uniformly gathered. That means the Minister’s job is doubly difficult, because she will not know how many children have no guaranteed guardian to pick any of these issues up, whether that is counselling or their financial position. It seems obvious that, as corporate parents, we ought to know how many children are in the position of sadly losing both parents.

I make a plea that we make counselling a given. It must not be something to be asked and fought for and sought out, whereby hopefully the local Member of Parliament knows about Victim Support or another charity, even though those charities do brilliant things. We must organise counselling for every child who loses a parent and do that through schools, partly to take some of the weight off the parent who is grieving. We must also start to act as corporate parents and record how many orphans there are. I hope that the number is infinitesimal, but for the two I came across in Walthamstow, I have never felt more impotent as an MP. We were trying to stop them living in horrific circumstances in which they had lost all support, funding and assistance, while we as a community were gathering together school uniforms for them and the foodbanks had to be there every single day.

I would be horrified if there were more children in that position, but since we do not know, we must do more to gather basic data to understand what is happening to some children in this country. We hope that it is a scenario we never have to deal with, but we sadly know that it is not the case. That is why it is so important that the House, as it does at its best, hears the stories and sees the reality of the messiness of human life, and acts. These petitions call on us to act on scenarios that sadly happen more than we might realise, and which we do not know the full extent of. I know the Minister shares my concern and compassion for people in that position and will want to do all she can. We must help her in lobbying her colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Justice for a better dataset of the children in that position. I know that is a view we hold across the House. Again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage for introducing the petition so eloquently.

16:58

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

It is an honour to speak under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I thank the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) for opening the debate. I would like to acknowledge all the people who have signed the petition, and Mark and John for all their work—it is good to see them in the Public Gallery.

I speak as someone who has, unfortunately, very personal experience of the issue we are debating today. My husband, 22 years ago, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, when my daughter was two and our baby was just five months old. He died a year later, a week before Ellie’s fourth birthday, when Laura was just 17 months old. They are now brilliant young women, and I am extremely proud of them. But it has been a long journey, and I can say from the bottom of my heart that grief lasts a lifetime. Bereavement issues come and go and change as the children grow up. The grief is quite strange when you are three; you don’t know where daddy has gone. When you are 17 months old, you cannot even speak. I think she could just about say “Daddy”; she was babbling a bit. It is very difficult to explain to a child of that age, so the other parent has to explain again and again, at different stages of life, as the children grow up.

One thing we read about in books, which is true, is that for bereaved children it is an issue that keeps coming back. They will be okay for a few years and then they will move school and suddenly it starts all over again. I remember that when both my girls started secondary school there was a conversation: “What do I say? Do I go in and say on day one, ‘Oh, my dad’s dead,’ or do I keep it quiet?” I remarried many years later, and then there was another question: “Do I call him Stuart or do I just say to my friends that he’s dad?” The girls just used to refer to us as “Our parents”, because that was easier. They did not want to have to keep explaining.

Retelling the story at school, over and over again, was very difficult. Ellie started school six months after her dad died. I had some brilliant friends who came to the house on day one of school, and we all went together because I knew she would be one of the only kids there who did not have mum and dad at the school gate on day one. It was like that every time: at every school carol concert, every play, every parents’ evening, every sports day, for years, there was a feeling that there should have been someone else there. One thing that was really hard was that I felt every year that I had to tell the class teacher; it was not a whole-school experience, so I had to keep retelling and re-explaining. When children go to secondary school and have lots of different classes with lots of different teachers, it is really quite something that, if things are difficult, we have to keep explaining it again and again.

The petition is so important. Perhaps things have changed a bit in the last 21 years, but the fact that no national data is collected is a sign that we still have not got to grips with this issue. The Childhood Bereavement Network estimates that more than 46,000 children in the UK experience the death of a parent every year. That is 127 children who are going through this every single day. We collect data on so many aspects of children’s lives, from school performance to health statistics, and even the number of children affected by divorce, but when it comes to bereavement children are invisible in terms of policy, planning and support, and that absolutely has to change. Bereavement is one of the most difficult experiences that any child can face, yet we have no clear plan or pathway to support children.

We know that the impact of bereavement is lifelong and can present emotional and psychological challenges. I remember phoning Winston’s Wish more than once as a parent to ask for some advice when things were kicking off and not going very well, and that organisation was absolutely brilliant. Shortly after—about a year after—Nick died, we joined Widowed and Young, and I eventually went on to chair Widowed and Young for a couple of years. It is an absolutely brilliant organisation and I could not have survived without it.

We used to go away for weekends with WAY. I had lots of friends who all had small kids, and I remember the kids were chattering away in the back of the car one day and one of them said to the other, “What’s a brain haemorrhage?”, and the other one explained. For them, it was so normal that all their dads had died. They just talked about it. It was so important for them to be able to connect with other children who had experienced the same thing and they felt able to talk to. Yet at school, it was not part of the conversation. Their friends did not know how to talk about it; they did not really understand. My daughters have often said, “Oh, my friends never mention it; they never talk about it.” It is just brushed under the carpet because they feel awkward.

Education about this issue should be on the curriculum. We do not talk about death enough in this country. We have talked about it a lot in this House over the last couple of weeks, but Friday’s debate was also an indication that we really do not have these conversations in Britain. We feel awkward about it, and it is really important that death becomes a much more normal thing to discuss.

I am going all over the place, but I will go back to the issue of data, which I have written down. If registrars were required to ask about the number of dependent children at the point when a death is registered, we could at least begin to understand the true scale of the issue. Local authorities could then use that data to make informed decisions about the resources required to support grieving families in their area. Nationally, it would help to make the case for a co-ordinated response to childhood bereavement and ensure that bereaved children get the support they need. Registrars could also signpost people to useful organisations if they knew there were children involved. Believe me, a bereaved parent needs all the help they can get, and knowing there are people out there who understand is really important.

The collection of data would also identify children who are not receiving support and would allow local services to monitor whether the services available are meeting the needs of bereaved children, and whether enough children are receiving the help they need. It would also allow us to ask the important question: are our systems reaching these children, and are they getting the right kind of help? Without that data, we cannot ensure that our services meet the scale of the need.

On educating children, we cannot expect them to process such a significant loss on their own. We also cannot expect teachers to navigate these issues without proper training and support. There are organisations out there. As the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) said, a lot of this stuff has already been done, and the resources are there to support teachers. By giving children a space to understand death—what it is, what it means and what it is all about—we provide an opportunity for a bereaved child not to feel quite so alone and different. Children need to be able to express their grief and to be supported in doing so, and teachers need to feel empowered to address this difficult subject, to ensure that grieving children do not feel isolated or misunderstood. If such education were part of the curriculum, we could ensure that teachers and support staff have the tools and knowledge they need to support children at the most difficult time in their lives.

Grieving children need to feel safe, understood and supported. The impact of losing a parent can be devastating; it affects every aspect of a child’s life for a lifetime. Without understanding the scale of the issue, and without having the right data and systems in place, we are leaving bereaved children to navigate this experience with little support, and leaving their parents to do a really difficult job on their own, without the wider support network they need. It is time that we recognised the needs of bereaved children. I urge the Minister to see what we can do, as fast as we can do it, so that more children get the support they need.

17:07

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. This is something like the fifth debate on this subject that I have taken part in since I became an MP in 2017, and it is more than two years since I asked the then Leader of the House whether we could have a debate on it. During those two and a half years, I have repeatedly asked the Government to look at a register for bereaved children, because it was suggested to me by Winston’s Wish.

I first thought about and became aware of this issue in a conversation with my sister over lunch. My sister, who is now 50, said to me, “Do you remember how when dad died”—when she was eight—“we never really saw anybody from social services? Nobody came to see us and nothing happened.” I said, “Yeah, that’s right, because we had never been in contact with social services. They didn’t think we needed them. Do you know it’s still the same?” I think a friend’s partner had died and I realised that nothing had changed in 40 years, and I thought that was ridiculous.

I spoke to staff at Winston’s Wish and they said, “Yeah, the problem is that we know how many children are bereaved every year. We know they are out there and we have the support networks to help them. We have the facilities. We have peers they can talk to who will appreciate it”—as the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) said—“but the charities and organisations do not know how to get in touch with the children because it is not recorded where they are.” The families do not know how to get in touch with the support networks because, when they go to record a death, no one asks, “Do you need help for a child?” It should be simple. That is why I think that a record, as the petition calls for, is the best way forward.

To turn briefly to other subjects, it is vital to teach about bereavement and loss in school—that is the role that schools have played—but, with respect to Members from the previous Government, they seemed to think that only schools should have responsibility. I do not think that is what children or their parents want. Children who have lost a parent, a grandparent, a friend’s parent or a sibling need help at times when the school is not available—at night, when they are lonely or upset, or when they are a teenager and do not know who to turn to for advice. That is when they need their peers. Often, they do not want to talk to the school, or they might move school and not know many people.

The idea is to have a register, a simple box-ticking exercise to say, when a death is recorded, that there is a child who may be affected, with paperwork handed out —the leaflets, the contacts—and that would not mean letting that data be public. There would never have to be any publication of the data; it would simply be putting people who need the help in touch with the people who can offer that help. If we do not do that, we face the situation that the hon. Member for Stevenage talked about: adults who went through a traumatic experience as a child never getting the help they need to get over it fully, so that it comes back when they are adults. That can get them involved in crime or drugs, or give them difficulty forming personal relationships.

When I spoke to one of the charities involved with adults bereaved as children, one of its psychologists said to me, “You do realise you could be opening a whole can of worms for yourself. You might not have dealt with this quite as well as you thought you did.” I think she is wrong, but we never know—it does come back in later life. It can contribute to the burden on the NHS or problems in the economy. If we will not look only at the huge moral and compassionate case for having this register, we should look at the economic one and see that that backs up the moral and compassionate case.

I thank the hon. Member for Stevenage for how he introduced both petitions, and I say to the Government: please, before my private Member’s Bill comes before the House in July, may we come up with a way of saving so many children in this country going through any more long-term pain? The help is there for them—charities such as Winston’s Wish want to help them, but they just do not know where those children are.

17:13

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) for opening the debate so eloquently, and for representing the views of many people who are present in the Public Gallery. I thank Mark and John for allowing their experiences to be shared today and for their campaigning on this incredibly important issue.

I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson) and my hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) for speaking so bravely about their personal experiences. It is never easy to talk in this place about personal experience, in particular when talking about the death of a loved one, a parent or spouse. That is incredibly difficult and it was a privilege to hear their stories—I thank them.

It is estimated that in the UK a child loses a parent every 20 minutes or so. In that moment, a child’s life is changed forever. The estimate does not include other losses, such as the loss of a sibling or a grandparent, which can be equally painful. I think back to the time of the covid pandemic, when talking to teachers and headteachers in schools in my constituency. They were dealing with an awful lot of grief, with children losing relatives they were close to, and they were having to cope with that grief in the school setting. Little data is collected on children’s suffering from such a loss, and I will come back to that in more detail.

Losing a loved one is devastating, no matter what age you are. However, particularly when you are young, still growing and perhaps unable properly to understand the concept of death, grief can be especially difficult to manage. Bereavement can have an impact on every aspect of a child’s life, including their wellbeing, education and overall life outcomes. For this reason, it is critical that children get the practical and emotional support that they desperately need.

Unfortunately, that is not currently the case for all children. There are no official statistics on the number of children who have been bereaved. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) said, we do not know how many children are in that situation or where they live. It is important that both local and national services are aware of the scale of the problem and can identify the children who need our support.

Like those who signed today’s petition and the Members who have spoken in the debate, the Liberal Democrats would like to see the establishment of a national register for bereaved children. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West for her campaigning on this issue. So many children slip through the net, and only some schools provide the support that pupils need. As we have been talking, I was reminded that 30 years ago, almost to the month, a girl in my class at school was killed with her family in a car crash. I remember that we came back after the Christmas holidays—they were killed while on holiday—and our class teacher brought us all together to have a conversation about it. I think back on how important that was. The school continued to work wherever possible with the girls who were closest to the girl who lost her life.

As we have heard from the stories that hon. Members have shared, that certainly is not universally the case. It is important that we recognise the schools that do this work, but so many do not. There is no national mandate from the Department for Education for schools to have a bereavement policy in place, nor is there any national policy to support schools with this. That needs to be rectified, and I hope that the schools Minister will take that away to her Department.

A number of national and local charities are trying to fill the gaps and support children and their families through grief, but lots of children are not being matched up with organisations that could provide them with support, and families are left scrambling. It is a difficult time. Other family members and parents are trying to deal with the grief too, so it is a stressful period. That is why my hon. Friend’s campaign, through her private Member’s Bill, for a legal duty for children to be informed of the support available to them following a loss is so important. I hope that the Minister will take my hon. Friend up on the offer to get this sorted before she has to bring it to the House yet again. The changes would help to improve join-up and ensure that the correct support was available as soon as it was needed.

Even though not every child might choose to take up the support or feel the need to do so, it would still provide a much-needed safety net. Although we do not have the data to know for certain, it is estimated that one in 29 children and young people have lost a parent or sibling. That is almost one child in every classroom. Every child will be affected differently, and we know that many will struggle with their mental health as a result of the loss. Grief is messy and complicated. It does not go away, and it can affect children at different stages of their life. Studies show that some children may have a seemingly mild reaction following a loss but will struggle in subsequent years as the reality sinks in. That is why it is so important that mental health support is available continuously for bereaved children, not just immediately following their loss.

I agree with what the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) said about ensuring that specialist bereavement counselling is available for children, but one reason why the Liberal Democrats have campaigned for years for a dedicated mental health practitioner in every primary and secondary school is to ensure that all children, including those who have been bereaved, have access to mental health support. There should also be community hubs available for children and young people right up to the age of 25, meaning that they can access support as and when they need it, on their own terms.

After a loss, not only do families face significant emotional challenges, but they may also face a financial one. Overnight, a household income can shrink by half, or potentially even more if the person who died was the main breadwinner in the family. Alongside grieving for their partner, many widowed people suddenly have to pay their household bills and childcare costs, or put food on the table, with a sudden loss of income. Bereavement support payments can be a lifeline for families during that time, providing a source of income that might not be found elsewhere. However, in 2017, the previous Government cut funding for those payments by around 50%. Especially in a cost of living crisis, those cuts have been devastating to many families who have suffered a loss.

According to the Childhood Bereavement Network, more than 75% of families are worse off than they would have been under the previous arrangements, with some going into debt and poverty as a result. That is why for some time, the Liberal Democrats have campaigned to double the funding for bereavement support payments. We would use the extra funding not just to increase the size of the payments, but to extend the period of time for which families receive them, giving those suffering from loss much-needed stability.

I am proud that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), who has talked very openly about his own loss—first he lost his father as a child, and then he nursed his mum as she died of cancer in his teenage years—has campaigned so vociferously on this issue. I am pleased that he worked with other hon. Members to pressure the previous Government to extend bereavement support payments to cohabiting couples.

[Caroline Voaden]

I add my voice to the calls to extend bereavement support payments. I was very lucky—well, not lucky—because I was bereaved before those changes were made, and I had bereavement support payments for quite a long time. I want to say a couple of things on that. The reason why someone gets bereavement support payments is that their partner who has died has paid national insurance contributions. My husband spent 20 years paying national insurance contributions, and he would never get a pension. To get some kind of payment as a bereaved parent is only just, because the state will never pay out that pension later on.

As I have previously said, grief does not just stop after 18 months. A bereaved parent of young children is left to pick up the pieces, look after their children and go back to work, because they have lost an income—quite often the main income of the family. It is important for the state of the NHS, our economy and everything else that a bereaved parent is as balanced and stable as possible so that their children can remain balanced and stable. It is good for the family and society as a whole. The more help we can give a parent—perhaps to work part time, so that they can be more available to their bereaved children—the better. Sorry, that was too long; excuse me, Mrs Harris.

[Munira Wilson]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention; she put across her points far more powerfully than I could, and I urge the Minister to listen. I hope that she and her fellow Ministers in other Departments will look at increasing the funding for bereavement support. At the very least, I hope they uprate it, because it has depreciated hugely in recent years. They should also increase the time period over which it is paid, because we have heard how important that is. I know that finances are stretched, but we are talking about a small number of children who have experienced the most horrendous loss.

The implications of a loss can be especially complicated for certain families, especially single-parent families where the caring parent dies. The loss of a parent or guardian can often leave children with no one to look after them, and as a result, family members may step up overnight to take care of them. Such a situation accounts for almost one in 10 children living in kinship care. That was the case for my constituent, April—I call her that to anonymise her. She suddenly became a kinship carer for her nephew, who had no one else to look after him after his mum passed away from cancer. His stepfather had left the family shortly after his mum’s diagnosis. At the council’s request, April stepped up at very short notice to provide a caring and loving home to her nephew, but that came at great personal cost to her and her family.

The Minister will be aware that I have long campaigned to ensure that kinship carers have the right support. Kinship carers such as April do their utmost to look after the children in their care, but they often need additional support because of sudden changes in their living arrangements, and because of the traumatic circumstances. Too many children in such situations simply cannot access the support they need, so we should provide better access to therapeutic support. We should also extend pupil premium plus funding to kinship children so that they are on a par with looked-after children and can access the support and wraparound care that they desperately need, inside and outside school. Unfortunately, too many kinship carers are desperately trying to get their children support, but to no avail.

These problems affect not just the children but the carers. Talking about her family’s experience, kinship carer Levette said:

“When my daughter passed away all I could focus on was keeping the children emotionally stable. Losing their mother was a traumatic experience for them and I wanted to make sure they were able to grieve. I wasn’t able to find time to grieve myself”.

No one should have to feel that way after the loss of a loved one. Although we cannot take away a child’s pain and grief, as a society we owe it to them to do all we can to provide emotional, practical and financial support. That starts with having a register, ensuring that schools have policies for teaching about grief and bereavement in an age-appropriate and sensitive way within the curriculum, and addressing the lack of financial support. It is crucial that we give children in difficult circumstances the best possible chance to overcome their challenges and thrive, so I hope the Government will implement the changes that I and many others have outlined today.

17:26

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I too thank Mark and Winston’s Wish for their work with bereaved children and all the practical help they provide. I also thank John Adams, who is trying to make something good come out of something absolutely terrible. I am grateful to everyone who signed the petitions that brought about this important and sobering debate.

When we think about these issues, we naturally think about people we know who are either going through or have been through terrible bereavements. I have a family friend with two boys the same age as my children; they are dealing with the loss of a wife and mother, and they all deserve a medal just for getting through the day. We also think about the ways that people overcome the adversity of these situations. I have a friend who life was shaped by losing his father at a young age, but he has made his life more extraordinary; he has become a wonderful, very strong person as a result of that early terrible experience.

Hon. Members shared similar examples. The hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) was incredibly open and told a compelling story about her experiences. She has been there; she is trying to take those terrible experiences and make something good out of them. My hon. Friend the Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson) has had an extraordinary life in many ways and is an incredible person; he too has taken a hard thing and made something good of it.

I pay tribute to all other Members who have taken part in this important debate. The hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) did a brilliant job of setting out the situation. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) made some compelling points, particularly about the joining up of data, and the hon. Members for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine), for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) and for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) made really important speeches.

To give a bit of a sense of hope, I want to mention some of the changes that have happened in recent years. The 2017 Green Paper on children and young people’s mental health set in train the provision of more support in schools. That included the offer to every state school in England of a grant for a senior mental health lead to start the process of improving mental health support in our schools. That was then built on in more recent years by the rolling out of mental health support teams in schools and colleges in England, helping more young people access that incredibly important support. When we left office we had got to about 400 mental health support teams in schools and colleges across England. I know the current Government will want to continue to roll out that support more widely.

I remember from my time as a Health Minister the way we were changing the treatment of mental health—first the commitment to give it parity of esteem with physical health and the mental health service standards, and then a 50% increase in the amount of money that we spent on it between 2018 and now. I do not take away from the fact that the demand is ever growing—there is still unmet need out there—but one of the important things that comes from this debate, of course, is that the resource is of no use unless we can connect it to the young people in need. The hon. Member for Walthamstow gave powerful examples of children who have literally seen their parents murdered. It seems the most obvious thing in the world that support would swing into action at that point, but it does not because we do not have that joined-up approach to data.

That was something that the last Government was working on from 2016. There were ongoing efforts to try to build a unique child identifier. I know that the current Government—this is not something we have any ideological disagreement about—want to finish that work and give us a joined-up approach. Through the private Member’s Bill sponsored by the hon. Member for Edinburgh West, we have the opportunity. The Department has the exciting opportunity of primary legislation, if it is needed, to make things happen. We can start to bring together the things that it seems so obvious should happen. We can bring together the knowledge that is dispersed through different bits of the public sector in our schools, our coroners and so on into a proper structured approach to help young people going through a hellish situation.

I pay tribute to the people who signed the petition to make this debate happen and to all the people, some of whom are here today, who have worked on this for many years to provide transformative help and who have excellent ideas, which I know the Government will want to take up. We will support them and the Government in doing that.

17:31

[The Minister for School Standards (Catherine McKinnell)]

I thank the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) for introducing this timely debate on an incredibly important subject in National Grief Awareness Week. It really is an honour to respond to my first Petitions Committee debate, a Committee I formerly chaired, from the position of a Government Minister with responsibility for issues that the petition raises. I have great respect for the work of the Petitions Committee and its importance in giving voice to people from across the country and the political spectrum to provide opportunities for important issues to be debated in a respectful way. I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to today’s debate, particularly those who have shared so openly and powerfully their experiences of dealing with bereavement.

I want to state my deep admiration and thanks to Mark Lemon for his tireless work to support children and families going through bereavement, including his work as an ambassador for Winston’s Wish, and his tireless efforts to ensure that the difficult conversation on bereavement can be helpful, open and constructive. It has brought about the discussion that we are having today. Bereavement touches everyone, but its impact is unique to everyone. It cannot be avoided—it should not be. It is crucial that those affected by bereavement receive the support that they need throughout their period of bereavement. It is particularly important for children and young people who lose someone close to them because it can have a profound impact on children and young people, and can affect their long-term health and wellbeing, particularly if left unaddressed.

I have unfortunately seen and experienced the challenge that childhood bereavement can present at first hand. I know how important it can be to have the right support available in a timely way and to be given the space and time to process it, as so passionately and eloquently described by the hon. Members for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson) and for South Devon (Caroline Voaden). Many would say that it is brave, but I say that it is a real gift to share such powerful, personal testimony. Not only does it give a strong voice to the issues we are debating today, but it will be of immense help to others going through similar experiences to hear from hon. Members in this place in such a powerful way.

I agree that we all have a role to play in supporting bereaved children and young people. There are so many fantastic charities and community groups: the Childhood Bereavement Network, Hope Again, the Anna Freud Centre and the Ruth Strauss Foundation, to name just four. They all play a vital role and I want to put on record our thanks for everything that they do. Government also have a clear role to play and are committed to improving the support that all young children should receive in a variety of difficult and challenging circumstances that they may face.

Given my role as Minister for School Standards, I want to focus my remarks on the support that can be offered through schools to pupils going through a period of bereavement. But responsibility for bereavement and support does not begin and end with the Department for Education. Within England, numerous Whitehall Departments are crucial to that, and many have been mentioned in the debate: the Department for Work and Pensions, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department of Health and Social Care. Three of those—the Department for Work and Pensions, the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care—continue to work together to address the recommendations in the report from the UK commission on bereavement, “Bereavement is everyone’s business”.

That report put the spotlight firmly on bereavement and the gaps in support, and the impact that can have on bereaved people. The Department of Health and Social Care continues to lead the work on implementing the report’s recommendations and chairs the cross-Government bereavement working group, on which the Department for Education also sits, to improve bereavement support. It is important that they continue to look at the options for how we improve support for bereaved children and young people right across Government, including the issues around data collection and improving it, which has been one of the key asks today.

Going back to schools, they do a brilliant job at supporting their students, including through difficult times, but school staff cannot be expected to be experts in mental health. Teachers do a fantastic job in picking up on the needs of their students and identifying when support might be needed, and that is why the Department for Education provides a list of resources for schools on supporting mental health and wellbeing. That includes support from the Childhood Bereavement Network and Hope Again, and resources hosted on the website of Mentally Healthy Schools for mental health leads, which will include supporting children dealing with loss and bereavement where that is needed.

Our manifesto was clear on the priority we place on improving mental health support for all children and young people, because we know that is key to helping young people achieve and thrive in education. We know we can do more to improve mental health support within schools, and how crucial it is to breaking down the barriers to opportunity. That is why we will provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school. We will also be putting in place new young futures hubs, including access to mental health support workers, and recruiting an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat both children and adults. The Department has already offered all state schools and colleges a grant to train a senior mental health lead by 2025 to help schools to develop an effective approach to mental health and wellbeing, including for any child going through bereavement.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage for his questions on the curriculum and potential legislation around that. I want to touch on relationships, sex and health education within schools because it has a vital role in supporting children and young people to look after their emotional and physical health and build supportive and successful relationships. What is taught as part of relationships and health education helps children to prepare for a range of experiences that they will have during their lives, both happy and sad, and through love and loss. It is important that children and young people feel comfortable and see school as a safe place to talk about their feelings, for them to be able to identify where they might need support and know how to ask for it, and for schools to know where it can be found. It is vital that difficult issues such as childhood bereavement are not shied away from but are talked about, as the hon. Member for South Shropshire put incredibly powerfully when sharing his own experience. Teachers need to know about common adverse childhood experiences, which can include bereavement, and understand how they might affect pupils both while they are at school and in the longer term, if they go unaddressed.

Through the mental wellbeing topic in health education, pupils are taught about a range of content, including dealing with bereavement. That teaching includes recognising their emotions and accessing how they are feeling. There is a whole range of external expertise and materials, so that teachers can tailor their lessons accordingly. For example, the Anna Freud Centre provides valuable support to children and young people dealing with loss and bereavement.

We continue to look for opportunities to improve the teaching of relationship, sex and health education in schools. We had a consultation, which started under the previous Government, that ended in July, and we are currently reviewing the RSHE guidance, which sets out the content of what children and young people are taught. We want to ensure that children’s wellbeing is at the heart of the guidance that the Government offer. We are looking carefully at responses, consulting relevant evidence and talking to stakeholders. We will set out next steps to take forward the RSHE guidance, and this debate will contribute to the thinking on that.

Beyond schools, the Government are committed to supporting families through the most difficult times. Family hubs do great work, helping families across vital services to improve the health education and wellbeing of children, young people and their families. As has been mentioned a number of times, to support a child or young person is to support their family too. The 75 most deprived local authorities received around £300 million from the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care between 2022 and 2025 to set up family hubs with integrated Start for Life services. Following the October Budget, we confirmed an additional £69 million from the Department for Education to continue the delivery of family hubs in 2025.

Family hubs are important because they offer a single access point for families. They reduce the stigma around accessing services because they provide a whole range of services, including parent and infant mental health. They have a focus on relationships and whole-family working, so they harness the power of networks and bring that together under one roof. They provide thousands of families with access to support when they need it, including potential bereavement support. All 75 of those local authorities have opened at least one family hub in their area, creating a welcoming space for families with children aged 0 to 19—or 25, where they have a special educational need or disability. They are effective in bringing together a wide range of services for families. There are now 400 family hubs across 75 local authorities.

It is important that we consider how to improve access to existing support for bereaved children when they need it, and when their families have made a conscious decision to find that support. The cross-Government bereavement group is looking at how to better improve access to support, as well as options around improving data collection. We are considering whether a legislative solution is the right approach, ensuring that there is an evidence base that it is the best way to support children and families and that it would not have any unintended consequences. We need to consider any potential negative impact of collecting data at such a sensitive time. All those factors need to be considered, which is why the cross-Government bereavement group will consider the existing roles and responsibilities of registrars in signposting support to bereaved children and their families. We will continue to look at whether and how that could be improved, including potential training and guidance for registrars, so many of the issues outlined today are certainly part of the considerations.

I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage for bringing forward this matter, and I thank all those who have contributed to this debate. It takes great courage to be so candid about experiences of grief and loss. Although we will all experience bereavement in our lives, we will all grieve in our own way. We have a role to play, however, in ensuring that children and young people get access to the support that they need, whether in or outside school, and get it when they need it. I particularly thank all those who work across education, the health and care systems and the charitable sector in the interests of children and young people who experience bereavement and their families and provide them with much-needed support.

17:45

[Kevin Bonavia]

The motion is that we have considered the petitions before us, and I hope everyone will agree that we have considered them well. Let us hope that there will be beneficial progress as a result of today’s discussions. I once again thank the petitioners.

I add my thanks to everybody who has spoken in the debate. This issue clearly has resonance across the whole House and across parties, and we have learned a lot from the personal experiences of Members. We heard from the hon. Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson) about his own experience of child bereavement, from the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) about the experience of a bereaved parent, and from the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) about the experience of the friends of children losing their parents. They are all big personal experiences.

I was not going to mention my own personal experience, but hearing from others today reminded me of what happened 26 years ago, when I lost my father to throat cancer when I was 20. At the time, I had a younger brother in his teens and a mother who had to cope for the family. This debate made me think, “What if I had the support that many people have today, and what if that was there for everyone?”, so I am grateful to hon. Members for sharing their experiences. How many hundreds of thousands of experiences like those are out there?

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) for sharing the experiences that MPs hear in their surgeries all the time. They were very harrowing, and we must take them as best we can, but we must learn from them and think about how we can join things up. As she said, the state, in all its forms, is a corporate parent.

I also thank the other Members who spoke. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O'Brien), whose cross-party approach I appreciated.

I thank the Minister for having such an open mind on this issue and for confirming that the Government will take forward what we have heard today in both the cross-departmental working group and her own Department. I will monitor that work and will help the petitioners to do that too.

Finally, I thank the petitioners themselves. They have put this issue on the agenda, and we are all grateful to them for doing so. As Members of Parliament, we will do what we can to keep it there.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petitions 636718 and 624185 relating to children and bereavement.

17:48

Sitting adjourned.