Children and Bereavement

Sojan Joseph Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris, and to follow the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia), who opened so eloquently, setting the tone for what is an important debate.

Benjamin Franklin said that nothing is certain in life except death and taxes. We certainly spend enough time in this place discussing taxes—as I am sure we will do later this week—but not enough time discussing death. We even try to educate children and young people about taxes and finance, but we do not do that with death at the right level in the national curriculum. It is a subject that many find hard, so the easiest way to deal with it is to not talk about it.

I pay tribute to John Adams, who is in the Public Gallery. He is a funeral director from Bridgnorth in my constituency. He has been a champion for adding death, dying and bereavement to the national curriculum, and he has done tremendous work. John is leading that work both nationally and internationally, and I believe he has been asked to go to Australia next year to speak there and help them. What we are doing here is pioneering, and that is good to see.

John has worked within the industry on this issue as the president of the National Association of Funeral Directors, as well as with Child Bereavement UK. There is an excellent video of John being an ambassador for The Good Grief Trust, where he shares resources to support education on the subject. He is also working in the education sector, as well as with many other organisations. He is certainly spending time doing everything he can, and it is to his credit that we are here today to speak about the subject.

John is committed to making the necessary changes to get the best outcomes for children, young people and their families—it is important to remember the families—when dealing with death and grief. That is no small thing; it is not an easy topic to pick up and run with. I was delighted to speak to John, who is one of my constituents and pioneered one of the petitions behind this debate. During our conversation, John told me of his personal experience of losing his mother Maria when he was 12. For John to pick himself up, not let life get him down or stop him talking about it, and decide that other people should not have to go through his experience, is excellent. Maria is the reason we are here today, so I give credit to John for the work he has done.

John told me that adding a standalone provision for grief education to the national curriculum will strengthen families when they need it most. It will improve resilience in school communities, and mitigate the impacts of bereavement as an adverse childhood experience. It builds on recent research that shows that children who are educated about grief before a traumatic experience can discuss grief and have less anxiety about the death. I know that from personal experience. My father Samuel died when I had just turned eight, and my mum was left alone with my two younger brothers and me. My father was only 37, and it happened in the school holidays. I remember going to school later in the day, because the teacher had to tell my class, “Stuart’s dad has died. Nobody mention it to him.” That was how it was dealt with. Even with the teachers and the children, nobody knew what to say. My friend told me what the meeting was about and what had been said, but nobody discussed it. If I misbehaved it was put down as, “Oh, he’s lost his dad—don’t say anything,” or, “How can we leave Stuart out?” If something went right or wrong nobody knew how to deal it, from the teachers to the students.

It was almost as if the event had never happened, and it was through other circumstances—I have spoken about this in the main Chamber—that I discovered the impact that it had on me. It took me many years to deal with it myself, but if I had had that education and awareness, and it could have been spoken about openly.

[Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)]

I worked as a mental health nurse in the NHS for many years and saw many people struggle with their mental health due to traumatic experiences, including family bereavements that happened many years ago, and they were never able to deal with it. Does the hon. Member agree that not addressing traumatic episodes at a younger age can lead to long-term damage to people’s mental health later in life?

[Stuart Anderson]

The hon. Member makes an excellent point. I agree 100%, but it is not always a single significant point. I lost my dad at eight, and I was shot at 17 in the military. For me, it was a culmination of different things. I have spoken openly about how I ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder, with all those different things, and spent 15 years living a nightmare, wanting to take my own life. All those things had built up, but if we deal with children’s mental health earlier—it is really hard to deal with—there is a way to come through. The way to do that is to grieve at the time, and to talk and discuss it.

I do not think that the weight of that should just fall on the parents. The school should support and work with them, because the children are at school for a long time. It is not just me, John and others who have commented on this. This goes across South Shropshire—the old constituency was Ludlow—as we have almost 2,000 signatures, so I know how important this is locally, and all the credit goes to John, who has been raising awareness of the issue.

As we are here to speak about these experiences, the previous Government launched a review about whether bereavement content is needed in statutory guidance, and pledged to consider the points made in the petition. The consultation ran until 11 July. The general election was called before it finished. I ask the Minister whether her Government can take up the work that was begun and look at putting this into the national curriculum, so that when other children face this—because they will—they have the right support. People will know things from other children in the class and that can teach us how to deal with this. It is not resource intensive—it could run alongside relationship, sex and health education or something similar—and it is not a financial burden. Investing time in the children, as the hon. Member for Stevenage said, will save far more time by dealing with things that become problems further down the line.

Having personal experience of this, and having been inspired by the work that John has done for all these years as a voice, not just in the UK but internationally on such a hard and difficult subject, I fully support what he is doing to put it in the right context. I urge the Minister to align with me and look at how we can put this back into the national curriculum and honour the work that John has done after losing his mother Maria all those years ago.

Indefinite Leave to Remain: Healthcare Workers

Sojan Joseph Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on his excellent speech introducing this important debate.

Members will know that before being elected to represent my home constituency of Ashford in July, I had spent the previous 22 years working in the national health service. As someone who also made the journey to work in the NHS from a foreign country, I will draw on my knowledge and set out in my short contribution why I support the e-petition and would back reducing from five years to two the time a foreign healthcare worker has to wait before qualifying for indefinite leave to remain. I would make the point that since I came to the UK in 2001, the rules have changed and people who have the same aspirations as I did now risk finding themselves excluded.

As we all know, the NHS is reliant on overseas workers. In the NHS workforce survey in June of this year, just under 30% of NHS staff in England reported having a non-British nationality. However, without proper incentives to both recruit and retain those workers, the employment deficit is likely to worsen. For example, in the years to June 2022 and June 2023, more nurses from the European Union and the European economic area left the NHS than joined. The picture is similar for healthcare workers from the rest of the world. In the year to June 2022, 4,702 healthcare workers left the UK, and for 2023 it was 6,610. In the year to June 2024, 7,957 workers left the UK.

The cost of recruiting and training an overseas nurse is anywhere between £50,000 and £70,000, while for a doctor it can be roughly £250,000—only for them to be tempted away by other countries with more attractive recruitment and retention policies, such as Australia and Canada. As the cost of living crisis has worsened over the past decade and a half across the country, especially in the south-east, where my Ashford constituency sits, stagnating wages and rising costs have not been a good incentive to keep staff in the NHS workforce.

This issue is also impacting patient care. Losing experienced staff is a big loss for the NHS. It takes 12 to 18 months for managers and matrons to train a newly joined staff member, so losing them in two to three years’ time is a big loss for the hospitals. Given those factors, we must rethink our retention strategy as a whole. Keeping in the United Kingdom skilled workers, especially those who have been the subject of large Government investment, is a vital step towards keeping our NHS alive and making it fit for the future. Therefore, granting healthcare workers indefinite leave to remain after two years rather than five is a necessary measure to solve the retention crisis identified by Lord Darzi in his recent independent report into our NHS.

By making a special case for healthcare workers and allowing them to make this country their permanent home after two years, we would show the importance of their roles in the NHS and our gratitude, as a nation, for their decision to come to the UK to train, learn and work in our healthcare sector.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Order. I should say that it is against the rules to work on a laptop while attending these debates.