Schools: Well-being and Personal and Social Needs

Lord Layard Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, if parents are asked what they want a school to do for their children, they almost always say two things: first they say, “I want my child to learn”, and then they say, “I want my child to be happy”. The question is this: are those in conflict? The scientific evidence is absolutely clear: they are not in conflict. In order to learn you need to be happy, with peace of mind and inner calm. Einstein once said that to make scientific discoveries, you need to be happy, and the same is true of children. Here is a recent analysis of a sample of American eighth graders who were tested at the beginning of the year on their IQ and their resilience. At the end of the year they were given their academic grades and, as a predictor of those grades, resilience was twice as important as IQ. You have to have the character as well as the brain.

Fortunately we now have a great deal more evidence about how to produce resilient, happy young people who do not engage in risky or anti-social behaviours. There have been hundreds of randomised controlled trials of highly structured programmes covering social and emotional learning, sex and relationships education and healthy living. I shall set out a meta-analysis of the effects of those programmes, each of which took about 18 hours of the child’s time. The effect on the emotional well-being of children was something like 11 percentile points up—from 50 to 61. The effect on behaviour was an extra 11 percentile points, and the effect on academic achievement was an extra 11 percentile points. These programmes are working on every dimension. So let us abandon the idea of a conflict between the objectives and ask schools to do exactly what parents want them to do. What a surprising suggestion.

What this would mean is complicated, so I want to make just three points. First, I turn to the whole school approach. Obviously, the whole school has to commit itself to making the happiness of its children one of its prime objectives. This should be a decision that is made after a great deal of debate involving teachers, parents and governors. I belong to a movement called Action for Happiness, which is preparing a code for schools that might wish to take a step of this kind. One would hope that every school will make the happiness of its children one of its prime objectives. That means going beyond what all schools are now expected to do—anti-bullying, anti-racism, anti-drugs—by trying to build up positive attitudes and adopting a positive lifestyle that children can enjoy, including replacing the desire to pass exams with the love of learning.

Secondly, I turn to explicit training in life skills, which is a particular part of the curriculum that is otherwise known as PSHE. Of course, this can be done very badly or very well. Undoubtedly, there are inspired teachers who can think it through for themselves, but these are very difficult subjects to teach. They can hardly just be given to someone who has a gap in their timetable. It is easy to teach these subjects in a way that makes no difference. We should not live in a Pollyanna world where we think that all this is easy and can be carried out successfully. It needs a great deal of thought and application. For example, the evaluation of the secondary SEAL programme, the only part of the programme that has been scientifically evaluated, shows that it makes no difference to anything. That is an important finding. The reason given—I must say that I foresaw this—was that the programme was not sufficiently structured to ensure that ordinary teachers could be guaranteed to achieve a result. We need to rely on much more structured, manualised programmes that have been scientifically evaluated to show that they make a difference. Perhaps I may declare an interest. I belong to a group that is aiming to put together a set of programmes from the hundreds I mentioned earlier in my remarks which could constitute the complete PSHE secondary school curriculum. If that was shown to work, we would be able to develop PSHE as a proper subject in schools and as a specialism within the PGCE.

I shall go back for a moment to the fundamental aim of all these programmes, which is to give children control over their minds. The idea is that we can all gain more control over our minds and our thoughts, which is particularly important because changing our thoughts can change our feelings and our behaviour.

This brings me to my last point, which is about mental health. This should obviously be a part of the basic training programme for every teacher and schools should become much better at identifying mental health problems among their children. In fact, the Good Childhood Inquiry that I was involved with suggested piloting a questionnaire tool to be used at periodic intervals over a child’s life, which would have the effect not only of helping to identify children who were in trouble—and many emotionally disturbed children do not show it; they are not always behaviourally disturbed—but of motivating schools to take the outcome of well-being much more seriously because they were actually measuring it.

Of course, once a child has been identified as having a mental health problem, there must be facilities available to treat them. I was appalled to read this morning that half of all mental health services are experiencing budget cuts at the moment, in many cases of 25% or more. This is an outrage. This is obviously such a big area of unmet need already in our country. We also know that mental illness among children has increased since the 1970s. A nationally representative survey has been conducted four times, supported by a local survey in the west of Scotland. Both these surveys found that there is twice as much emotional and behavioural difficulty among 15 year-olds as there was in the 1970s. The reasons given in subsequent questioning are, not surprisingly, more anxiety about looks, possessions and, of course, exams.

This brings us back to the question of whether we can shift our schools from exam factories to schools for life. I think we really have to do that and I really hope that the Minister can persuade his Secretary of State to open his powerful mind to that issue.