Bereaved Children: Government Support

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD) [R]]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for bereaved children.

First, I thank the Backbench Business Committee and all those who supported my application for the debate, not just on my behalf because we have the opportunity to discuss this issue, but for many thousands of children and young people in this country who feel that their voices are not heard, that they are not being listened to, and that we are not hearing what help they need in what, for some, will be the darkest times they ever experience.

I am grateful to this Government because, since they came to power, they have shown some appreciation of the problem—more than their predecessor—which is reflected in the fact that their strategy for young people mentions the need for support. However, there is so much more that needs to be done. This is an issue that affects this country on many levels: the human, the personal, the social and the economic. I will come to the economic issue later.

First, I will take a moment to explain how I came to this point and why this issue matters so much to me, and why I understand how it matters to others. My dad was just 44 when he collapsed one Saturday morning just before Christmas and died. It was a heart attack. Without any warning, our comfortable, happy, working-class family was plunged into uncertainty.

My sisters were eight and 13. Having turned 20 just the week before, I thought I was an adult; it was only years later that I came to appreciate the impact it had on me, and, indeed, on all of us. I had instantly become not just the second adult in the household, but, in reality, the second parent. When my own daughter was eight, and then again when she was 13, I struggled with watching her with her dad, realising—probably for the first time—exactly what my sisters had lost and had been through, and what my mother had dealt with.

Then—irony of ironies—when my daughter was the same age as I had been, almost to the day, her father died of a sudden, unpredicted heart attack. I saw that she was not quite an adult, and realised that neither had I been. In helping her cope, I saw yet another aspect of our family’s dynamic and challenges from a new perspective.

The moment when it came home to me that something had to be done about this on a wider scale was when I talked to my youngest sister—the one who had been eight when dad died. She asked me if I remembered that we had not had any support from any organisations—from anyone. She pointed out that that was because before he died, we had never been on the radar of social services or needed support, so at that moment they did not know that we needed it. There was no support mechanism to help mum and to discuss the sort of emotional challenges we would face, because nobody was really aware of who we were and what we needed.

In a lot of ways, it is exactly the same today. The organisations and charities are there and they want to help, but unless someone is on the radar of social services, those organisations and charities have no way of knowing who needs help, where they are and how to contact them. It is very difficult for families in distress to figure out exactly where to go and how.

It is more than three years since I first raised this issue in the House and called for a protocol or a process to identify those young people at the point of their loved one dying. There is genuinely support across House, from individual MPs and from the all-party parliamentary group on grief support and the impact of death on society. We have had debates and I have had meetings with Ministers. Everyone is supportive—it is just the action that is missing.

Too often, I have been told that schools and GPs are there to help. Yes, they are; they do a great job. However, bereavement affects every aspect of a child’s life, not just school. The campaign “Grief Matters for Children” has shown that children who are bereaved are at an increased risk of depression, anxiety and physical health problems, have lower academic attainment and are over-represented in the criminal justice system. Yes, GPs and schools are vital, but they are not there at weekends, at Christmas, during school holidays or late at night when children need someone to talk to. What if a child moves home? What if it is an estranged parent who dies, and the school does not know?

One of the main issues is that where there is support, there is huge variation in the provision of services across the UK. Services have developed in an ad hoc way, and there are inequalities in provision. Many struggle for funding, and large areas of the country are still without services that support children. Even in areas that do have a service, there are long waiting lists or travel times, and services’ survival is precarious. The pandemic made it worse: waiting lists for child bereavement services were increasing, and there were already concerns about access, which the pandemic only exacerbated. We need to do more.

That brings me back to how we know where there are children to help—the protocol and the process that I have called for. We do not collect data; we have no way of knowing. It would be simple: when someone dies, the registrar could just take a note if a child or children are affected. That would be a chance to signpost support to the family with relevant local information. We could give families the opportunity to opt in to a real-time referral pathway, similar to those for families bereaved by suicide.

Local data on the number of children and young people bereaved could be combined with activity data from local services to identify what proportion of children and young people are getting support. Data on which children and young people have been bereaved could be linked to other datasets such as those on the use of health services. The understanding of the impact of bereavement on children’s health and their futures could be much improved just by taking a note when someone dies. That knowledge of where children are, who needs help and what help they need would make such a difference.

Of course, we also need to make sure that children are getting the right help. When they were asked by the UK Commission on Bereavement what they needed, half of the bereaved children and young people who shared their experiences said that they got only a little or no support from their education setting after their bereavement. The commission recommended that all educational establishments have a bereavement policy, including staff training and a process for supporting bereaved children and their families. What a difference that would make. Winston’s Wish, the charity, led the “Ask Me” education campaign, which takes this a step further by asking all schools to sign up to a manifesto to pledge to see each bereaved student as an individual and ask the simple but powerful question, “What do you need? How do we support you?” Given the critical role that schools play in children’s lives, the fact that we already acknowledge that they do so much work, and the fact that the answer is always to turn to those schools, what are the Government doing to improve the consistency and tailoring of bereavement support in educational establishments in support of pupils’ wellbeing and learning?

Can we finally make sure that, after 20 years, grief education becomes a vital part of the national curriculum and attempts to get us over our national aversion to talking about grief? If we do not start talking about grief more openly and regularly, we will never begin to tackle the problems that it creates in society. We know that children who suffer bereavement and do not have support in coping with the trauma will likely have problems in later life. They are more likely to have difficulty forming relationships, more likely to get into trouble and more likely to live in poverty.

Various reports, including one by Sue Ryder, show that grief costs the UK economy an estimated £23 billion a year. We could help to mitigate that. We could take preventive measures that protect children and safeguard a healthy economy in the process. The situation has not been helped by the change in bereavement payments to families and the fact that they have been frozen for the past nine years. I ask the Government whether they will address that particular shortcoming. Will they fix it?

When I started to get involved in this area a few years ago, one charity that works with adults bereaved as children warned me that I might be opening a can of worms. I did not think so, but now I am not so sure. Meeting young people who faced losing someone close and felt that they did not have the support or the understanding that they needed has been both inspirational and heartbreaking—inspirational in seeing how they have coped and heartbreaking in knowing that they have lost an important emotional and economic anchor in their lives. Sometimes it is the only emotional anchor. No moment drove that home to me more than a meeting in Parliament where I met representatives of Winston’s Wish and some young people. One girl thanked me for everything I was doing and said, “But you understand, don’t you?” And I do, but I am not the only one. I also know that my sisters and I were very lucky. We may not have had the official support that we needed and that all young people deserve, but we did have support. Too many children today will face the trauma that we and hundreds of others have faced without support. An estimated 127 children go through it every day in this country. Every 20 minutes while we have been in this Chamber, someone has lost a parent.

Above all else, those children ask us to ask them what they need, and then to make sure that the authorities, ourselves included, provide it. They want us to make sure that no child in this country feels alone, unsupported or lost without the friend, sibling or parent that they have lost. I ask the Government to make sure that they get that help.

--- Later in debate ---

[Christine Jardine]

I thank everyone who has taken part in the debate and spoken so movingly and powerfully about their own experiences and the experiences of those they have spoken to. I also thank the Minister for laying out the steps that the Government are already taking to move towards the better understanding and support that we have all talked about.

If I may say so, I think the shadow Secretary of State for Education, the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), summed the debate up best. It is on occasions like this, when there are no party divisions and we talk to one another as individuals about a problem that affects us all and the people we know and represent, that we see the best of this House. If any children who are grieving are watching, they will hopefully think that we have taken a first step in listening to what they have been telling us and are moving towards what they need to support them.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered Government support for bereaved children.