Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on an excellent opening speech. I agree that our schools could do much more to prepare pupils for the challenges of today.

I declare my interest as founder and chair of a small mental health charity, Books Beyond Words, which I shall mention briefly later. Before I became a Member of your Lordships’ House, I was a clinical academic psychiatrist, specialising in child and adolescent mental health as well as in learning disabilities. As a community psychiatrist, I regularly went into schools—usually special schools—to consult teachers and think with them about the needs of their children. I agree that prevention is better than waiting for a crisis.

Like other noble Lords, I have had briefings from a number of mental health charities working in schools to improve children’s mental health, including Young Minds and Speech and Language UK. The briefings highlight that more than one-third of children and young people with mental health needs also have special educational needs, including speech and language difficulties.

This week is Emotional Health Week, promoted by the Centre for Emotional Health. Yesterday, its focus was on child development. Research clearly shows the impact that our relationships and emotional health in childhood—particularly in early childhood, but throughout the school years as well—will have on our future life chances. Last week the centre, in partnership with Demos, launched a paper called Strong Foundations: Why Everyone Needs Good Emotional Health - and How to Achieve It. It made several recommendations, including that the Department for Education should develop evidence-based guidance for schools and colleges on how best to implement learning about emotional health—in other words, what I call emotional literacy. This report included a recognition of how picture books can support social and emotional learning for children.

This resonates with me, as the founder and chair of Books Beyond Words. The charity works with artists to create stories in pictures about the everyday challenges that children face. Recently, the charity has been working in a pilot group of schools to see how word-free books can support the emotional well-being of primary school children as well as young people with special educational needs and improve teacher confidence in talking about common mental health challenges. An independent evaluation found a strong causal link between the creative reading of word-free stories, usually in small groups, and pupil progress towards improved emotional well-being, stronger peer relationships and an ability to express a range of feelings. Being able to recognise and express our feelings, such as anxiety, frustration and stress, can reduce the distressed or challenging behaviour that sometimes leads to the school exclusions highlighted by Young Minds. Exclusions are not the answer. Children with poor emotional health find it difficult to learn and are reluctant to go to school.

Using pictures rather than words helps children of all ages and abilities to engage with the topic and to express themselves. They can identify their feelings, discuss coping strategies and be empowered to speak up for themselves. After just one term of using word-free books once a week, 95% of pupils made progress towards being able to express and recognise a range of emotions. Case studies showed that attendance improved, and they had better than expected achievements in tests—all evidence of the importance of good emotional health.

I suggest that schools have a crucial role in fostering a nurturing environment and moving away from a punitive culture. Children need to feel comfortable and safe at school. School targets need to be more holistic. Ignoring well-being does not lead to overall better outcomes. Schools need to adopt a whole-school approach to mental health and well-being, which aims to promote mental well-being and to intervene early when common mental conditions present, such as depression, anxiety and self-harm. A whole-school approach to mental health and well-being is a cohesive and collaborative action in and by a school community, strategically constructed with the school leadership—that is really important; school leadership has to be on board. There also needs to be an ethos that promotes respect and diversity. The curriculum and teaching should help children and young people to develop their resilience and support their social and emotional learning.

We know that childhood is a period of extraordinary potential. Get it right, and we are investing in the whole of society. We know that adverse childhood experiences are key predictors of poor physical and mental health and well-being throughout a person’s life. We know that prevention is better than cure. I consider that a child’s emotional well-being and mental health cannot be considered in isolation from their school environment and the culture within that school.

There is burnout among some school staff, recruitment and retention issues and school staff reporting that they feel unequipped to manage the mental health needs of their pupils. There are high levels of persistent absence, and we know that young people who are absent from school are more likely to have a mental disorder; a punitive approach is therefore rarely the answer to poor school attendance.

Let me tell your Lordships about Sarah. She started to struggle with her mental health when she started secondary school. She was involved in a car accident over the summer holidays and became increasingly anxious about leaving her home. She had already been finding school difficult and started missing days at school. When she did manage to get to school, she was told off by teachers for her poor attendance, which made it more difficult to attend. Nobody asked her why it was so difficult to go to school. Her anxiety got worse, as did her attendance. Then her parents were asked to pay fines because of her poor attendance. She has now been out of school for a year and remains on a waiting list for CAMHS.

What are the solutions? I do not really have time to talk about them, but I agree that schools need to be more fun. They also need to be more real, addressing the things that really matter to children and young people.