Schools (Mental Health Professionals) Bill [HL]

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 1st March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to wind up for the Opposition. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that this has been an incredibly well-informed debate. We are all grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, for bringing the Bill forward and for the way she argued for every school to have access to a qualified mental health professional.

The growing increase in the incidence of mental disorder suffered by so many young people is alarming, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, rightly said. My great fear is that we are storing up so much trouble for the future that, unless we deal decisively with the issues now, we as a nation will face severe problems in the decades ahead. That is not confined to mental health: last month, the Academy of Medical Sciences released a very stark report highlighting wide-ranging evidence of declining health among children under five in the UK. More than a fifth of five year-old children are overweight or obese, one in four are affected by tooth decay and vaccination rates have plunged. Although we are focusing on mental health today, we must recognise that there is a much wider health dimension to the situation for many of our young people. As the right reverend Prelate suggested, this will have an impact on them for generations and on our economy, in terms of the number of people who will be fit to work in the future.

My noble friend Lord Watson correctly asked why that is happening and the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, had a go at answering. She suggested that it was because of pressure in education and I agree with her. I will not mention SATs much today, but there are issues around the pressure that some children feel because of the insistence on the SATs process. There is also the impact of social media and the pandemic. The right reverend Prelate also mentioned concerns about climate change. I think he was thinking of malevolent, dominant global powers; we know what he means by that.

This issue, however, is surely also linked to the persistent absence of children. In dealing with that, we have to understand the underlying causes. I look forward with interest to the Minister giving her analysis of why she thinks it is such a persistent and worrying problem.

The second major issue that comes across is the challenge for us all—particularly as parents, grandparents, guardians and those concerned about young people—in what to do when faced with a young person in distress and the problem of navigating the system. Again, I ask the Minister to explain more about what she thinks is, and ought to be, the response of local agencies to that gap. I particularly want to understand the relationship between education and the integrated care services in the health service. What mechanisms are there to provide some kind of point where one can go to seek help? I am afraid that, at the moment, barriers are set up and rationing processes are put in place. For parents desperately concerned about the impact of mental health issues on their child, it becomes alarming, so we need to think about what immediate help we can give.

Noble Lords quite rightly commented on the number of young people affected by mental ill health and the problem of providing appropriate access to services. The scary thing for me is that one in three children and young people referred by a professional was unable to access any mental health treatment whatever. That has been called the missing middle—the gap. We also heard the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, speak very movingly about a small coterie of people struggling hugely to get the support that they need.

The noble Earl, Lord Russell, spoke so movingly about some of the challenges that parents face. Again, can the Minister say what we are going to do, faced with this massive number of children—it is estimated to be 232,000—who cannot access any support whatever? Of course I recognise that schools can be tremendously helpful in this regard. As I understand it, in research they are the most commonly reported source of advice and help by families. However, the question is whether they have enough resources or enough access to other resources to be able to fulfil that responsibly.

The economic case for investing in support for schools is pretty overwhelming. There is a direct link between the number of children with poor mental health and those who do not do well in education. The Resolution Foundation found that if children aged 11 to 14 suffer poor mental health, they are three times more likely not to pass five GCSEs, including English and maths, compared with healthy children. That, of course, goes right through the system. They do not get into work as effectively and their life outcomes are very poor. As a society, if we are concerned about the future, and are therefore concerned about the number of people in the working-age population who are not in work at the moment, as we certainly ought to be, the case for investment in young people’s mental health and in schools in particular is very strong indeed.

Like other noble Lords, I acknowledge that the Government, through NHS England, have rolled out nearly 400 mental health support teams, and more are planned. The Minister will of course know that one can hardly resist the temptation to quote Jeremy Hunt at her; he said that the current programme is “unacceptable” with regard to progress in rolling it out to the rest of schools. I ask her again whether at this point the Government will review this and listen to the arguments that have been put today to ensure that we give it the right priority.

As regards the Opposition—the Labour Party—we believe that we have to put far more energy and focus into: improving mental health services; cutting waiting lists for mental health services by recruiting more staff; introducing specialist mental health support for children and young people in every school; having open-access children and young people’s mental health hubs in every community to meet some of the gap that noble Lords have identified today; and passing legislation for a new register of home-schooled pupils to keep track of those not in mainstream schooling, as part of a new package of measures to deal with persistent non-attendance.

In conclusion, in welcoming the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and what she said today, we cannot be complacent. The scale of mental health disorder among young people is now so great that their future and the country’s future are very much at risk. I hope the Minister will be able to respond positively to this afternoon’s very well-informed debate.