Support for Bereaved Children

David Johnston Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (David Johnston)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) for securing a debate on this important topic. It is typical of him to bring such an important and sensitive topic to the House. I am delighted that he has been joined by his constituent Dan from Priestley College, who wrote a considerable portion of my hon. Friend’s opening speech. It was an excellent speech—he might like to start writing speeches for other colleagues, perhaps myself included. I thank him for his courage in bringing forward his story. We had a chat before the debate, alongside his friend Finn. Dan spoke movingly about his experience, and he should be proud of the way that he has sought to bring what has been a very sad experience for him to this place to help other young people experiencing grief. He should also be pleased to have a friend like Finn.

We will all experience a bereavement at some point in our lives, and it can be most devastating for children and young people because it is not the order that we expect life to go in. Just as bereavement touches us all, we all have a role to play in how we support the bereaved. We—Government, parliamentarians, schools, health professionals, voluntary and charitable organisations, and everybody, really—have a responsibility to ensure that children and young people can access the support they need when they need it.

Responsibility for bereavement sits across different Departments, including the Department of Health and Social Care, but I will obviously focus on the work of the Department for Education. What I will say is the Department of Health and Social Care continues its work to address the recommendations in the “Bereavement is everyone’s business” report from the UK Commission on Bereavement. Following that, we established a cross- Government group with representatives from over 10 Departments to improve bereavement support and ensure better joined-up work across Government. We will keep working with the commission and the voluntary sector, including the Childhood Bereavement Network, to explore how their findings could inform policy.

Schools and colleges, which I will focus on most given that I am a Minister for the Department for Education, clearly pay a key role in supporting children, including through difficult times. We are grateful for the vital pastoral support provided by headteachers and staff. Although we cannot expect those staff to be specialists in mental health, bereavement or trauma, they know their pupils best and are well placed to determine the pastoral support that they might need. To support them, we are offering all schools and colleges a grant to train a senior mental health lead to help them put informed support in place, drawing on specialists where needed. More than 16,700 schools and colleges have now received a senior mental health lead training grant, including more than eight in 10 state-funded secondary schools.

In addition, we announced £1.3 billion of recovery premium funding for schools, which, on top of the pupil premium, can be used to deliver evidence-based approaches to support pupil mental health and wellbeing, and that can include counselling or other therapeutic services. We have also been rolling out mental health support teams in schools across the country. They offer support to children experiencing common mental health issues, such as anxiety and low mood, and they try to facilitate smoother access to external specialist support. As of April, the teams covered 44% of pupils in schools and students in further education in England, and we are extending the coverage to reach at least 50% of pupils by March 2025.

More broadly, we are providing record levels of investment in increasing the mental health workforce to expand and transform NHS mental health services in England. The NHS forecasts that, since 2019, spending on mental health services has increased by £4.7 billion in cash terms, compared with the aim of £3.4 billion that was in the NHS long- term plan. Some 345,000 more children and young people will have access to mental health support by March 2025.

What is taught through the school curriculum is clearly important, too. Through the mental wellbeing topic of health education, pupils are taught a range of content relevant to dealing with bereavement. That includes recognising and talking about their emotions and how to judge whether what they are feeling and how they are behaving is normal. It is important that young people know where and how to seek support, including who at home and school they should speak to if they are worried about their own or someone else’s mental wellbeing.

In addition, last week, we published our revised relationships, sex and health education statutory guidance for consultation, which specifically includes bereavement. The guidance sets out that all pupils should know that change and loss, including bereavement, can provoke a range of feelings; that grief is a natural response to bereavement; and that everyone grieves differently. It is designed to enable schools to deal sensitively with the individual needs of their pupils, and we are grateful for the support we have had from charities such as the Childhood Bereavement Network and the Anna Freud Centre in developing the guidance. Before this debate, Dan told me how helpful he had found support from Child Bereavement UK. It should be commended for that.

I appreciate that Dan, Finn and his classmates, along with thousands of their contemporaries across the country, are currently in the midst of exam season. Where bereavement has the potential to affect a pupil’s ability to attend exams, the Department has published guidance that includes examples of effective practice to support these students. Regular attendance at schools and colleges is, of course, crucial to both the development and wellbeing of children and young people, and bereaved pupils need time to grieve and may understandably find it harder than others to attend. Schools and colleges should work with pupils, parents and carers to remove any barriers to attendance and work together to put the right support in place. That should include having sensitive conversations, developing good support and considering whether additional help from external partners, including the local authority or health services, would be appropriate.

Dan, Finn and I had a good conversation about data collection, and my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South is quite right that the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) has been doing a huge amount in that area. We continue to talk to her and others about what to do regarding data collection. Candidly, in one sense, the simplest way to know the children who have been affected by a bereavement is for them to be recorded on the death certificate. However, we have a significant concern, as I explained to Dan, that anybody can buy a death certificate and that the information about who the children of the deceased were would therefore be accessible to everybody. That carries potential negative consequences that we do not want to facilitate. We may find that that causes other problems.

In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South introducing this debate, I have had a conversation with officials about whether we might add a question to the school census regarding bereaved children. That partly requires schools to know. We recently added a question about young carers, and that has been helpful for us to begin to understand how many children are young carers. That was something that charities supporting young carers have wanted for some time. I am happy to commit to exploring whether that is appropriate to do in the case of bereaved children.

[Andy Carter]

I am very grateful for that comment; it is very much appreciated. My experience of registering a death is that someone goes to the registrar, they fill in some forms and they are able to record a number of details, but they do not receive a great deal back. So would the Minister also consider exploring opportunities for registrars in county council areas and unitary authority areas to provide people with information at the point that they register a death, especially when a parent is bereaved and the child’s death is acknowledged in that process? I understand the points that the Minister made about recording information on a death certificate, but is there a process whereby some information could be handed over at that point, when the death is registered?

[David Johnston]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and I am happy to have a discussion with my colleagues in other Departments to see whether something like that might be feasible.

One of the things that we are keen to ensure—again, I had this conversation with Dan and Finn before the debate—is that we balance the need to ensure that children and young people receive support against the fact that some of them may not want certain people to know what has happened, including their school and teachers. We may feel that it is better that their school and teachers know, but it might be the case that, for a whole host of reasons, it is not something that they want to be known or to have discussed. Nevertheless, as I say, I am happy to take that suggestion away and discuss it with my Government colleagues.

[Christine Jardine]

Further to the point that the hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) just made, I agree that perhaps there is no need to put the information on the death certificate. However, when it comes to the school census, very often children will have moved from one parent’s house to another’s, if the parents have separated, or even to their grandparents’ home, so the school has no way of knowing. It would therefore be useful to inform the school, but we also have to take into account GDPR. So it might not be as easy as the schools being able to tell people. However, if the person responsible for recording the death could set the whole process in motion, that might be easier.

[David Johnston]

The hon. Lady makes a good and important point. These things always involve considerable practical challenges, so they often sound simpler than they are in reality. However, we will certainly see what it is possible to do, given the constraints that she just identified.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South again for securing this debate. Children and young people who lose someone close to them deserve all the support, help and love that they can get. Nobody experiences grief in the same way, but we always want to consider how we can best support children and young people in the toughest circumstances, and where support is needed the Government are committed to ensuring that it is available and accessible.

Finally and most importantly, I thank and pay tribute to Dan for bringing about this debate. It is not often that someone of his age secures a debate in Parliament, and I am very impressed by the work that he has done to turn his very difficult experience into positive change for other young people.

Question put and agreed to.