Bereaved Children: Registry

Claire Coutinho Excerpts

Tuesday 28th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Claire Coutinho)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary.

I thank the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) for securing this debate on an important subject. I know that she has had personal experience of the issue, which is very close to her heart. I thank her very much for sharing that with us. I also thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who spoke movingly and eloquently about his own experiences with bereaved children. I know that many of us here will have experienced that and we share that profound sympathy for anyone going through bereavement.

The Government take the issue of supporting children and young people very seriously. As the hon. Member for Edinburgh West rightly pointed out, different elements of that support fall across Whitehall. I have a particular responsibility for children’s social services, which the hon. Member mentioned in her speech. Responsibility for responding to the needs of bereaved children ranges across the Department of Health and Social Care and the Home Office, and I will touch on that in my response. I should point out that the provision of support for bereaved children in Scotland is primarily a matter for the Scottish Government, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) for her contribution. My response will primarily focus on support provided in England, however, and I will reference the figures and policies that apply to England.

Losing a parent is heart-wrenching experience for anyone. I have experienced that as an adult, but it is profoundly disturbing for children to lose a parent. I welcome the work of Winston’s Wish—funnily enough, my father was called Winston—and that of many other people. How families, children and young people respond to the loss of a loved one is very personal to them. As a Government we recognise the deep impact that bereavement can have on a child’s life and the far-reaching consequences it may have on their mental health, which has been touched on, their wellbeing and their academic performance, which might require additional support.

The hon. Member for Edinburgh West is right that there are no official statistics that record the number of bereaved children in the UK. The Childhood Bereavement Network—it too has been mentioned and I welcome its work on the issue—has estimated that 26,900 parents die each year in the UK, leaving approximately 46,300 dependent children aged zero to 17. Those figures are based on sources such as the census and mortality statistics in the absence of other data, so they can provide only a rough estimate.

Not all children will need access to services when they experience bereavement, which is largely testament to the wider family network support that so many children receive. Where additional support is needed, the Government are committed to ensuring that it is provided. It is important that we draw on all arms of Government, including the Department of Health and Social Care, to provide mental health support and services, as well as many other Government Departments working on programmes for families, which includes the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, to ensure that we provide that joined-up support.

We are always looking at how we can improve support for bereaved children. As a result, the Government are committed to ongoing engagement with the voluntary sector and across Government to assess how we can provide further support for children who have been bereaved. Before coming to the issue of the register, I want to set out some of that support. One of the most important ways we can support bereaved children is through providing support for their family. Early help services play a pivotal role in supporting families, and can be used in some cases to support children through bereavement.

We have taken a number of actions to prioritise such services. “Stable Homes, Built on Love”, published earlier this year, sets out our bold and ambitious plans to reform children’s social care. Family help reforms are central to delivering our vision of a reformed system, will provide effective and meaningful support for families and will feature multi-disciplinary teams, bringing all those different partners together to meet the whole needs of a family. We are providing more than £45 million of additional funding to pathfind family help.

That builds on our wider support for families, including the £695 million supporting families programme, which this year sees its 10th anniversary. It has helped more than 650,000 vulnerable families by supporting the whole family to achieve positive and sustainable outcomes. The Government have also invested more than £300 million to establish family hubs and transform Start for Life services in 75 local authorities. Those family hubs will provide mental health support for parents and young people, with guidance on where to reach more access to mental health and emotional wellbeing support. Further, the statutory guidance, “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, is clear that local areas should have a comprehensive range of effective evidence-based services in place to address needs early.

I want to turn to mental health support, which has been rightly mentioned today. Hon. Members will be aware that that falls under the Department of Health and Social Care, but we are looking at expanding the help that young people can get in schools via the Department for Education. We are expanding specialist mental health support by investing an additional £2.3 billion a year into mental health services by 2023-24, so that 345,000 more children and young people a year will be accessing mental health support by then.

In schools, we are introducing mental health support teams, which will offer support to children experiencing common mental health issues such as anxiety and low mood, and will offer smoother access to external specialist support that we know can be so helpful. They cover 26% of pupils in England, a year earlier than originally planned. That will increase to 399 teams, covering about 35% of pupils, by April 2023, with more than 500 planned to be up and running by 2024.

More than 11,700 schools and colleges have received senior mental health lead training grants so far, which includes more than six in 10 state-funded secondary schools, backed by £10 million this year. In May 2021, £7 million was invested in our wellbeing for education recovery programme, building on the success of our 2020-21 £8 million wellbeing for education return programme. More than 14,000 state-funded schools and colleges in England benefited from the two programmes, which provided free expert training, support and resources for staff dealing with children and young people experiencing additional pressures from covid-19, which included a focus on supporting pupils with bereavement.

We have announced £1.3 billion recovery premium funding for the 2021-22 and 2023-24 academic years for schools, which on top of pupil premium can be used to support pupil mental health and wellbeing. That can include counselling and other therapeutic services. As part of the support we offered in response to the covid-19 pandemic, we have provided a list of resources for schools to draw on in supporting pupils’ mental health and wellbeing, which includes signposting to the Childhood Bereavement Network, Hope Again, and resources from the Anna Freud Centre.

Bereavement is also considered in our thinking on the mental health and wellbeing part of the relationships, sex education and health curriculum, so that can be taught in schools. We are all aware that attendance is an issue post pandemic, and it is in our minds that bereaved pupils might find it harder than others to attend school, and to think about how schools and partners should work together with pupils, parents and carers to remove any barriers.

As the hon. Member for Edinburgh West is aware from our recent meeting, responsibility for the registry of bereaved children sits primarily with colleagues from the Home Office. The Home Office has recently confirmed there are no plans to change the law in that respect, but I would encourage the hon. Member to continue having such conversations with the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (Miss Dines), who is the Minister responsible for safeguarding. Everyone will agree that support for bereaved children is incredibly important. I know the hon. Member has already had some good conversations, and there is a lot of sympathy for the work that she talks about. I look forward to working with her, and continuing to talk about how we can best support children who have experienced profound loss, across the whole of Government.

I thank the hon. Member for her eloquent and emotional speech, and for securing a debate on this important subject. Loss, and other traumatic experiences, have a profound impact on children, and I pay tribute to the children and their families who are dealing with unimaginable grief. The Government are committed to providing support through early help services as required. That is more effective in promoting the welfare of children than reacting later, as has been mentioned. I look forward to the further work we can do in this area.