Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

It is pleasure to speak to Amendment 88 in particular. We are very pleased to see it. This is an important group of amendments. We believe that there is a need to do more in this area.

I am very proud that my party—a couple of years ago now or maybe it was last September in Brighton—set out a new NHS target ensuring that patients start receiving appropriate treatment, not simply an initial assessment of need, within a month of referral. We have committed to recruiting 8,000 new staff so that 1 million additional people can access treatment every year and we also think there should be open-access mental health hubs for children and young people in every community, providing early intervention and drop-in services to support pupils and solve problems before they escalate.

We would like to see a full-time mental health professional in every secondary school and a part-time professional in every primary school. The evidence base for this is good and there are some excellent projects and work happening in schools that I have visited. I will recommend one, Place2Be—the Minister is nodding and it is good that she is aware of this and she supports it too. It looks at the general well-being in the school and also supports staff in the school. We think that that is important too.

We are concerned about the patchy nature of the support that is available. In too many cases there is a lack of early intervention and prevention. The waits for children’s mental health services have been described as “agonising” by the chief executive of the YoungMinds charity, and a BBC freedom of information request revealed that 20% of children are waiting more than 12 weeks to be seen. By the time they get to that point of referral, the problems are usually already pretty severe and causing huge anxiety and stress to the child, as well as to the wider family. The Government could fund this in part by removing the VAT exemption from private schools—but I know we will come back to this at later stages; we will probably discuss it in more depth next time.

One of the most urgent needs of our time is mental health, and we must make sure that children and young people get early help, with specialist support in every school. It is urgent, and it is quite remarkable that the Bill does not mention mental health.

The noble Lord, Lord Woolley, is not here, and he will not be speaking to Amendment 171E. However, while I am on my feet, I point out that he is talking about extending the remit of Ofsted to consider the work being done. We are interested in this, but, if this idea was to be pursued at some stage, we would also be interested to make sure that Ofsted has the expertise and resources to do this work in the way that I am sure he would want to see happen.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for Amendment 88 and for allowing the Committee to return to the question of mental health support in schools.

The Government believe that school leaders should have the freedom to make their own decisions and prioritise their spending to best support their staff and pupils, especially as they address the recovery needs of their children and young people from the pandemic. This support can include school-based counselling services, and we have provided guidance on how to do that safely and effectively. To provide this support, schools can use the additional £1 billion of new recovery premium announced in the autumn, on top of the pupil premium, as well as their overall core school budget—which has significantly increased—to support their pupils’ mental health and well-being. As I said, this can include counselling or other therapeutic services.

However, as the noble Baroness acknowledged, schools should not be the providers of specialist mental health support, and links to the NHS are vital. That is why we worked with the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England to create mental health support teams—which the noble Baroness referred to—funded by NHS England, which are being established across the country. As the noble Baroness said, the teams, made up of education mental health practitioners and overseen by NHS clinicians, provide early clinical support and improve collaboration between schools and specialist services.

The Government believe that, rather than funding for specific types of support, we should continue to give schools the freedom to decide what pastoral support to offer their pupils. However, to support schools in directing that funding we have put funding in place, as the noble Baroness acknowledged, so that they can train a senior mental health lead in every school, who can then look at what approach is best for pupils in each school.