Equality of Opportunity for Young People

Baroness Fall Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fall (Con)]

My Lords, there is no more important issue to society than the well-being of our young people and the creation of an environment in which they have the opportunity to fulfil their potential. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, on drawing this topic to our attention today.

Before young people come of age they remain our responsibility and under our protection, whether we are parents or citizens of the country. They are educated in our schools, treated in our hospitals, breathe the air of our cities, live by our laws, must abide by the results of elections in which they do not vote and have to put up with the decisions our generation make, some of them good and some of them less so. This is a huge responsibility and certainly should not be taken lightly.

It is a responsibility brought home to me every morning as I look at my sometimes quite intimidating Generation Z children sitting across from me at the breakfast table. This is a generation that has still to find its voice. I think of the immense challenges that they and all young people face, but with which I am sure they will have the vision and capability to grapple. One of our jobs is to make sure that they have the opportunity to do just that and to be the best they can be.

However, there is clearly a range of issues—some of which have already been discussed in this Chamber—that we need to address to make this a reality. What kind of things do I mean? A new think tank called Onward, on whose advisory board I sit, published fascinating statistics a few weeks ago and I should like to share a few with the House. According to the OECD, millennials are being squeezed out of middle-income households. According to Civitas, nearly 1 million more young people live with their parents than 20 years ago. Onward’s survey of Generation Y discovered that more than half of those aged under 35 are worried or very worried about their personal finances. One in four people aged between 18 and 24 say that they find social media pressure difficult to manage, and they are rightly worried about climate change.

We also know that at least 10% of young people in Britain today suffer from mental health issues. That could be as much as 20% if we include those not yet caught up in the system. This is a problem of epidemic proportions and I single it out today in my comments, echoing today’s earlier debate.

If we consider that 50% of mental illness in adults starts under the age of 15 and 75% before the age of 18, the problem of today’s children will soon become the problem for tomorrow’s adults. We are projecting a mental health problem of major proportions towards the future. If we are to try to deliver equality of opportunity and beneficial quality of life, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, suggests, this is a big obstacle. We see it in the worrying level of mental health issues that have arisen in our universities with tragic cases of student suicide on the rise. As the Times columnist Clare Foges wrote recently, on top of the stresses of a life on social media and financial stress,

“there lurk three further assassins to wellbeing: too much unstructured time, too much isolation, too much distance from the comfort of home”.

This can result in tragedy for some and misery for many.

Our universities need a good long think about how they can provide more support and a more engaged environment for students, but the problems often start well before university. I welcome the growing awareness of the problems of children’s mental health in society today, I pay tribute to the many powerful charities, such as YoungMinds and Place2Be, which do so much to help, and I commend the Government on making this a priority and on the many proposals set out in their Green Paper.

However, awareness is only the first step, and we are some way from rolling out a holistic solution. Let us look at the Government’s focus on solving the problem in schools, which I welcome. The proposal to introduce a designated school lead for mental health is not yet fully explained. We must make sure that these leads are well trained and their role is clear. Without properly trained counsellors, there is a danger that we will get better at identifying who needs help without being in a position to offer them the help they need. A recent EU-funded study shows the UK way down the European league table for the numbers of CAMHS psychiatrists and hospital beds. A recent study from the Children’s Commissioner found funding down in real terms in one-third of areas in England. Inconsistencies in funding are undermining efforts to get to grips with the problem.

We continue to face a toxic combination of stringent thresholds, which lead to rejected referrals—nearly one-third—and those who are lucky enough to be referred often being left languishing on waiting lists. By the time they get to see someone, the situation is quite a lot worse.

We owe our young people more. We need to do what we can to give them the best chance of a worthwhile life and playing their part in society, fulfilling their potential and being the teachers and doctors, mums and dads of tomorrow. They are our future, and at the moment we are a long way from where we need to be in supporting them.

Education and Society

Baroness Fall Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fall (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the words of other noble Lords in thanking the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for once again bringing us together, at the end of the year, to reflect on such important matters to our nation and to learn from one another. Education is certainly not just for the young.

We ask a lot of our children and pin great hopes on them. They are our future, after all. We ask them to navigate a complex and difficult world, one which operates 24/7 and in 360 degrees through Facebook and Instagram, and blurs the lines between private and public. Our children never get a day off; some never get a night off either. But what is our legacy to them? It is an inheritance of debt; a dream of owning their own home which is dimmer than our own; a mistrust of politics; a growth of populism; a decline of productivity; a climate of storms, real and political, to navigate in a world where truth is hard to get a handle on and in some quarters has been declared out of vogue. Our debate today throws the net wide so I would like to touch on two different issues in my remarks, both of which are vital in building not only a flourishing society but a flourishing democratic, tolerant and liberal one, made up of happy, confident adults. I speak of mental health issues and of social media.

I turn first to mental health. We are allowing a generation of children to reach adulthood without the support they need to be the rounded, stable, independent human beings they can and should be. These are our future citizens: mums and dads, teachers and leaders of our country. The figures are sobering. Last year, as many as one in 250 children was referred to what is known as CAMHS by professionals. Of those, nearly a third were turned away altogether and nearly 60% were left to languish on waiting lists. This means a lot of desperate and disappointed children, as well as families under enormous strain doing their best to support them. A recent joint report of the Commons education and health committees noted:

“50% of mental illness in adult life … starts before age fifteen”,


so the troubles of today’s children will soon become the troubles of tomorrow’s adults. We have been slow to act. There is a growing cry for help and not enough help at hand. I welcome signs that people are finally beginning to listen but let us hope that this listening translates into real solutions. I welcome the Secretary of State’s mental health initiative, announced earlier this week.

Certainly, some of the answer must lie within the school community. I speak here of primary as well as secondary schools, where many of the problems first emerge. Teachers and parents are often the best-placed people to spot problems at first and, for some children, a few meetings with a counsellor at school will be all the help they need. However, let us be clear that others will need a full programme of treatment within the NHS, and we will never solve the problem if a lack of trained councillors, rigid thresholds, rejected referrals and unacceptable waiting times remain. Of course we must not shy away from the source of the problem and why the cries for help are growing in the first place. Some of that comes down to education and to what we teach our children way beyond the three Rs: a sense of well-being, self-respect, kindness and consideration for others and a sense of community and nationhood.

In the rush to win the global race, we must remember who we are trying to win it for. We have much to do for every child to grow up to be the happy, independent, functioning adult they can be. When they reach that golden age of adulthood, we ask them to do something very important: to participate for the first time in our democracy and exercise their vote. Of course, there is far more to democracy than the casting of a vote. Our tradition of western democracy is underpinned by the rule of law embedded in a tolerant society which protects freedom of expression, encourages debate and presides over a free press. Once every few years, our citizens are asked to assess their Government and decide at the ballot box whether they want more or less of them.

At the heart of a healthy democracy lies the integrity of the poll, and today we cannot escape the uncomfortable and growing realisation that one of the key sources from which we take our critical views may be open to manipulation. I talk, of course, of social media. Where once we might have watched the evening news and read a trusted newspaper, we now have at our fingertips an infinite number of news sources, often from unknown origins, through which to navigate at high speed all day. We scour the net. We are less certain of what is information, what is misinformation, who to trust and what is real and what is not—bishop or Russian bot. Our judgment of the content of what we read is clouded by the lack of context and the waves of supercharged reactions that are so powerful. They are sometimes a force for good and necessary change, and sometimes they are not. When the truth emerges, if it does, it is often too late to diffuse the tensions that have been created. The reality is lost in the mist of anger, so the storm rages about how our democracy is under threat from social media but there are few ideas about how to address it. While I have no doubt that regulation in one form or another will come, I am less certain that we can count on it to protect the integrity of our democracy.

That leads us back to the individuals who use it in the first place and to their judgment, which brings us back to education. It is vital to teach children from a young age to navigate the web, to help them assess the validity of what they read and to explain why they should care in the first place. Rather than wrapping our children in cotton wool and surrounding them with safe places we must encourage debate in the classrooms of our country and the campuses of our universities so that our children have the confidence to form a view, to weigh it up against the argument of another, and to be open to challenge and sometimes to change. As Aristotle said, it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. I speak today for our duty to bring up a generation of young people to be confident, stable adults—citizens of the future—who are able to navigate the abstract world which is theirs to inherit.