Young Women: Self-Harm

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I know this area is of great interest to my noble friend and he has done very good research on it. He is quite right to highlight the impact that, unfortunately, parental conflict and breakdown has on children. The Department for Work and Pensions, in a cross-government approach, is doing particular work on supporting parents. I also know that the best schools and community health services work to provide that kind of parenting support. There are a number of parenting programmes out there. I assure my noble friend that that evidence takes a proper place in the mental health strategy that we will be publishing for children and young people.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a trustee of the Brent Centre for Young People—a mental health service for adolescents which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Does the Minister agree that adolescence is a hugely challenging part of human development and that we put far too much pressure, far too often, on adolescents and interfere with their successful development, with the outcomes described in this Question? Will he look at Lucy Crehan’s work Cleverlands, an international comparison of the best performing schools, and her criticisms of the British and American systems? She finds that we put far too much pressure on head teachers through Ofsted inspections. It is a punitive, rather than a supportive, act and we should review it to see whether we could be more supportive of head teachers and get a better, supportive atmosphere for children in our schools.

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I congratulate the centre the noble Earl works for on its anniversary. He is absolutely right about the pressures of adolescence. Unfortunately, the causes of self-harm are not well understood. One of the hypotheses is that the motivation appears to be stress relief, which is an incredibly disturbing idea. I am aware of Lucy Crehan’s work from my previous work in schools. I do not think you can link school accountability with the kind of pressures we are describing today and how they manifest in self-harm. We want schools to be successful. It is vital that children are well educated. It is also true that that can be done in a number of ways. The best schools, including ones that I have been involved with in the past, practise something called positive education which emphasises not only the academic aspect but also character and well-being. I think that is the approach that we need to follow.