Mental Health Education in Schools

Mike Kane Excerpts

Monday 6th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. I acknowledge the good work done by the Shaw Mind Foundation in securing the debate. For Adam Shaw, the foundation’s chairman and founder, after struggling for 30 years with his own mental health, which led him to the brink of suicide, this is a personal issue. It is vital that we listen to the voices of those such as Adam who have experienced mental ill health in their childhood. They are telling us that understanding our own mental health is a life skill, which should be part of our childhood education as much as reading and writing. The response from the public to Adam’s petition shows that that view is shared by many people in the UK. This debate has left us in no doubt that action needs to be taken now to safeguard our children’s mental health.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) made an exceptional speech. It was a real tour de force, highlighting national and local policy and bringing in individual cases from her constituency. The 103,000 people who signed the petition so that it could be debated in Parliament today can be extraordinarily proud of her contribution.

Other contributors to this debate include the Chair of the Select Committee on Education, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon). I could not agree more that mental health requires a whole-school approach rather than just being pushed into PSHE lessons. As a former PSHE co-ordinator for a primary school in the borough of Trafford, which I represent, I know that mental health cannot be taught in the time given to that subject. More must be done.

The hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan), who is also a member of the Select Committee, spoke extraordinarily powerfully about the stigma that needs to be shattered; this debate is part of doing so. I join the right hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) in congratulating the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry, who have raised the issue. He also spoke powerfully about the need for teacher training to incorporate mental health education in colleges and universities up and down the land.

The hon. Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris) gave an extraordinarily powerful personal testimony about his own mental health during his childhood. MPs being brave in that way in public life are beginning to shatter the stigma. The right hon. and learned Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald) also spoke eloquently about the good practice that he has seen between NHS councils and schools in his constituency. We need exemplars of good practice across the land.

My hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), citing the World Health Organisation, said that mental health would be the defining issue of the 21st century and that there is a tsunami coming. He is a passionate advocate for mindfulness day in, day out in this place. We have had an extraordinarily good debate. As a former teacher, I know that schools are struggling to deal with an upsurge in mental health needs among pupils.

The hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron), in an excellent speech, brought her clinical prowess and expertise to this Chamber. As she pointed out, statistics show that one in 10 children have mental health issues. That is three children in every classroom of 30. One in five adolescents experience a mental health problem in any given year. A recent survey by the union NASUWT involving more than 2,000 teachers and school leaders further underlined the scale of the problem: 98% said that they had come into contact with pupils whom they believed were experiencing mental health problems, and 46% said that they had never received any training on children’s mental health or on recognising the signs of possible mental health problems in children.

We know that half of people with mental health problems as adults present symptoms by age 14, and 75% do so by age 18. Shockingly, suicide is the most common cause of death for boys between the ages of five and 19. Data from a recently published Government study showed that one in four girls are clinically depressed by the time they turn 14, and hospital admissions for self-harm are up by two-thirds; the number of girls hospitalised for cutting themselves has quadrupled over the past decade.

I also want to point to research on the LGBT community. Stonewall found that more than four in five young people who identify as trans have self-harmed; that is an incredible statistic. Three in five lesbian, gay and bi young people who are not trans have self-harmed. Shockingly, more than two in five trans young people have attempted to take their own life. For that community, mental illness rates are huge.

The number of young people aged under 18 attending accident and emergency for a psychiatric condition more than doubled between 2010 and 2015, yet just 8% of the mental health budget is spent on children, although children represent 20% of the population. Referrals to CAMHS, as has been mentioned, increased by 64% between 2012-13 and 2014-15, but more than a quarter of children and young people referred were not allocated a service. Perhaps most damningly, Public Health England estimates that only 25% of children and young people who need treatment for a mental health problem can access it.

Following the groundswell of evidence of mental ill health in our children and young people and the system’s abject failure to deal with it, the Prime Minister announced in January, to a fanfare, a package of measures aimed at transforming mental health support in schools, workplaces and communities. As my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) pointed out following the Prime Minister’s announcement, that will not deal properly with the burning injustice faced by children and young people with mental ill health.

I am afraid that this Government talk a good game on mental health, but in reality, they have continued to underfund services. The Government’s proposals do nothing to improve waiting times for treatment for children and young people, and they put pressure on schools to take on extra work on mental health, at a time when they are having to cut budgets. The Minister and I have been no strangers to discussing budget cuts in this Chamber over the past six months.

The evaluation of the mental health services and schools link pilots published in February underlined the lack of available resources to deliver the Government’s offer universally across all schools. Headteachers are telling us that real-terms cuts of £2.8 billion to school budgets threaten existing in-school care. On top of that, funding for child and adolescent mental health services fell by almost £50 million between 2009-10 and 2012-13. The Government also cut £600 million from mental health budgets between 2010 and 2015, and the number of mental health nurses in our country has decreased by 6,000 since 2010. Our Government continually expect our teachers, schools and health services to do more for less.

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mike Kane]

I would love to give way to the right hon. Gentleman, so I can regroup and have a glass of water.

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

I do not want to spoil the harmonious general cross-party agreement on this point, but the hon. Gentleman’s litany of despair occurs against the background of a substantial investment in mental health in this country. The problem—I see it in my constituency, and I am sure that everyone in this room sees the same thing—is the time from what, in the Army, they call flash to bang. Once the money is voted and put into the service, it takes a very long time to bring through properly qualified people to deal with the problems.

[Mike Kane]

The right hon. Gentleman spoke eloquently about the need for better mental health provision for teachers throughout our country, but I point out to him, as part of the litany of despair, that a third of teachers who have trained since 2011, on this Government’s watch, have already left the profession. We must deal with these issues if we are to have a future cadre of teachers who are adequately trained in mental health education.

On the upside, there are things that we can do. We could invest in CAMHS early interventions by increasing the proportion of mental health budgets spent on support for children and young people. In order to protect service, we could also ring-fence mental health budgets and ensure that funding reaches the frontlines. We know that school counselling is an effective early intervention; Labour have committed to ensuring that access to counselling services is available for all pupils in secondary schools.

Early intervention is much cheaper to deliver, as has been pointed out. The Department of Health estimates that a targeted therapeutic intervention delivered in school costs about £229, but derives an average lifetime benefit of £72,525. That is a cost-benefit ratio of 32:1. Of children and young people who had school counselling in Wales in 2014, 85% did not need any onward referral to children and adolescent mental health services.

The sad fact is that the Government’s plans for school budgets will result in further cuts to school counselling and wellbeing services. Labour has said that it will fund and ensure that every secondary school in England and Wales offers counselling. This Government’s sticking-plaster approach to our children’s mental health has not been, is not and will not be good enough. I urge the Minister to look closely at the recommendations of the first joint report of the Education and Health Committees, “Children and young people’s mental health—the role of education”.

Teachers are not mental health professionals, but they are the frontline professionals in daily contact with our children and young people, and are often the first to spot the signs of mental ill health. They are also overworked, underpaid and under-resourced, so adding an additional responsibility to their workload without the necessary training and investment will only deepen our teacher recruitment and retention crisis. Our schools need an honest approach from the Government that acknowledges the £2.8billion real-terms cuts in school budgets since 2015.

We must act now and give our children the knowledge and confidence to take charge of their own mental health. If we do not, we will never be able to relieve the huge strain on our NHS, CAMHS, social services and teachers. The Prime Minister must make good her pledge and act on children and young people’s mental health. If the Government believe in parity of mental and physical health, they will ensure not only that age- appropriate mental health education is available for children in our schools from primary school upwards, but that our schools are properly funded with the resources to deliver that.