Children’s Wellbeing and Mental Health: Schools

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

It is an honour to serve under you as Chair, Mr Nuttall, and I thank the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) for securing this timely debate, which he opened excellently.

Mental health in schools is devolved to Wales and provision there is often used as an example of good practice. Today I would like to draw Members’ attention to certain areas of good performance in supporting children’s mental health services in Welsh schools, particularly in Gwynedd, the county in which my constituency is located and that I served as portfolio leader for education between 2008 and 2012. There is always room for improvement and there are still areas of concern, some of which infringe upon non-devolved competencies and impact heavily on the wellbeing of children and young people.

I will just point out that student union presidents at Grwp Llandrillo Menai, the three-college further education institution for north-west Wales, are so troubled by the prevalence of mental health issues among 16 to 19-year-olds that they have chosen Mind as this year’s cross-college union charity. The Children’s Society’s “Good Childhood” report for 2016 highlights the issues affecting children’s wellbeing, as well as the connections between wellbeing and mental health. It calls for the introduction of statutory provision of emotional wellbeing and mental health support within schools in England, to act as a point of early help and to provide referral to specialist services if necessary.

Although they were conveniently timed during a row surrounding the “humanitarian crisis” in health, I am sure that we all welcome yesterday’s announcements about reform of mental healthcare, particularly the pledge to offer mental health first aid training in schools. The Government are making the right noises, but the detail is yet to be communicated. The real-terms increase in health spending is unlikely to meet the requirements created by health inflation over the coming years, so it is by no means a silver bullet solution, and of course it has implications for the Barnett consequentials that Wales receives.

As I have said, counselling provision in schools is already on a statutory footing in Wales. During the Plaid Cymru and Labour “One Wales” Government of 2008, the goal was set of ensuring that every secondary school child could access counselling as needed. In addition, in our first few months as an Opposition party last year we secured a landmark budget deal with the Welsh Government, whereby we realised a manifesto pledge to increase spending on mental health services by £20 million a year, and to improve access to trained counsellors and therapists in the community.

An example of a successful school counselling scheme is being implemented by Plaid-run Gwynedd and is operating in both Gwynedd and Ynys Môn. Since its instigation in 2008, 500 children a year have received counselling, and I am glad to say that very few of them have gone on to be referred to child and adolescent mental health services. In fact, in 2014-15 more than 11,500 children and young people across Wales received counselling, and 89% of those seen did not require onward referral after the completion of their counselling.

However, despite significant progress in that field in Wales, there are still areas of concern. A number of issues remain about the provision and delivery of CAMHS, including the transition from child to adult services and the support offered to children and young people who do not meet the clinical threshold for CAMHS but who still need support. In Wales, the comparable waiting times for child and adult mental health services are such that four of every 1,000 children and young people are waiting for treatment, which is eight times greater than the equivalent number of adults.

A particular point to which my attention was drawn came from my surgeries, as I am sure is the case for many Members here today. It seems that those children and young people who cannot attend school because of mental health issues fall between the cracks. Olivia Hitchen is 15, and I am glad to say that she was happy for me to mention her name—of course I asked her first. She lives in Corris in Dwyfor Meirionnydd and has explained how better support needs to be provided for young people who suffer extreme anxiety when they are placed in the crowded environment of a school classroom. It struck me as interesting that we expect children to operate in social groups for the purpose of education in a way that is strikingly different from the operation of most working environments; we do not usually put people in large groups with one person addressing them. If individual children do not fit into the conventional classroom, there seem to be precious few alternatives for them, particularly if they have mental health issues as well.

Olivia is highly intelligent and articulate. Her issues with anxiety appear to be reduced when she does not attend formal education, but she now needs to achieve formal qualifications, such as GCSEs, through examinations. Surely our education system should match the needs of the child and not expect our children to be moulded to the needs of the education system.

My final point today relates to the non-devolved ways in which children’s wellbeing may be improved. Of course, poverty increases the risk of mental health problems; it can be both a causal factor and a consequence of mental ill health. My constituency of Dwyfor Meirionnydd has one of the highest poverty rates in the United Kingdom. Of the 11,312 children living there, it is estimated that 2,510 live in poverty. Increasingly, those children who are in poverty live in a household where at least one adult is in work—there are 1,958 children in that situation in my constituency. A move into work is not automatically a move out of poverty. The impact of this Government’s punitive universal credit moves is hitting children in my area hard. Families in my constituency face a four-year freeze in their benefits, and the cumulative effect of the changes to support will mean that many families lose out overall, thus aggravating mental health-related issues.

Every child must be given a chance of achieving robust health and happiness. Despite the gains created by the examples I have cited from Gwynedd and from Wales overall, more must be done at both Welsh Government level and UK Government level to ensure that the best opportunities exist for all our children.