Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development

Lord Bishop of Chichester Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chichester]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for sponsoring this debate on a matter of great importance for the future life of our nation, and for the challenging sensitivity to the issues that she laid out for us in her introduction.

Church of England schools now educate just over 1 million children—around 20% of the country’s education provision. The Church’s current Vision for Education, published in 2016, is for an education system that promotes

“life in all its fullness”,

a phrase used by Jesus Christ in St John’s Gospel, and invites a wholistic approach to education, considering the material, cultural, social and spiritual dimensions of human existence and the wisdom with which we use the gifts God has given us.

In the diocese of Chichester, where I serve, our schools serve the many coastal towns of Sussex, with their distinctive blend of tourism and deep deprivation, as well as extensive rural areas, where small village schools play a vital role in the way that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, identified. We in Chichester will not be alone in forging partnerships in our Church schools with NHS mental health support teams. I pay tribute to their importance. It has enabled us to develop home-school-church networks, building vital work where the life of school and the life of home interact. It also makes it possible to find better ways to support children who suffer with their mental health.

This NHS partnership has also opened up another partnership through a diocesan multi-academy trust that is working with the University of Sussex to assess the impact of the Covid pandemic. Among the things emerging from that are questions about the impact that working from home might be having on children’s attendance at school. It also looks at the impact of social media, which expanded for many children during lockdown, and asks questions about the extent to which cell phone use, for example, now might need to be more carefully restricted in schools.

I will also refer to the independent education sector, which is well represented in Sussex. It faces many of the same challenges among the pupil body but often with greater resources for meeting them. I wish to draw attention to just one aspect of this, since it indicates, as has been stated, a loss from the maintained sector: the need for arts provision, especially music, as a non-word-based medium that makes articulation of their deepest feelings much easier for children who might struggle with words. This can be especially true for pupils who experience the trauma of violence and abuse, as it can be for neurodiverse pupils, those with learning difficulties, or those for whom English is not their first language. The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, outlined these important points in greater detail in her comments.

This is something that Brighton College has developed remarkably well. It has used it as a way to welcome Ukrainian refugees into its life and to forge a strong partnership with schools in the East End of London. The model speaks to us about something that has been done and shown to be of enormous value, which surely also belongs to the right of all children as part of their school experience, especially those children with special needs.

Reference to the importance of wider influences that contribute to the educational life of young people is also evident in a recent study undertaken by the University of Leeds, which indicates that when fathers engage in

“multiple types of structured activities several times a week”,

it

“helps to enrich a child’s cognitive and language development”.

This raises important questions about the role of fathers in parenting, and about their absence—physically, emotionally, economically—and the subconscious impact it might have on their children. From a government perspective, might this suggest that it would be worth giving attention to the gender balance of the teaching profession and encouraging an increase in male teachers, especially in the primary school sector?

These observations indicate the intensity of the context in which education is delivered by a remarkably dedicated profession of teachers and classroom assistants, who face complex human needs that have to be addressed before other aspects of learning can take place. Sustaining that profession, with adequate resources through the recruitment of people of high calibre, remuneration that is commensurate with the skills we expect of them, and public recognition of their important work, is surely one of the best contributions the Government can make to the mental, intellectual and spiritual well-being of our children and young people in their schools.