Oral Answers to Questions

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

As today’s shocking research from the National Education Union shows, one simple step that could help the most disadvantaged children is providing them with a healthy meal. It is more than two years since the Government committed to a healthy schools rating system. When will they act?

[Damian Hinds]

I am glad that the hon. Lady mentions the issue of providing meals for children at school. We have done a great deal on breakfast, and we have also extended eligibility for free school meals on three different occasions—in a way the Labour party never did when it was in government—through universal infant free school meals, free meals in further education colleges and, most recently, the roll-out of universal credit.

Mental Health and Wellbeing in Schools

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered mental health and wellbeing in schools.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I am delighted to have secured today’s debate on mental health and wellbeing in schools. I am sure that many hon. Members will know that I am a former teacher. My interest in this subject comes from the link between mental health and wellbeing and learning. I will come later to all sorts of issues surrounding children’s mental health and the lack of services out there, but I hope that today’s debate will focus on how this issue affects children, and indeed teachers, in schools.

Schools are not just places where we help students and children to learn resilience and the skills that they need to build themselves up so that they become adults who can cope with all sorts of pressures that are thrown at them; schools themselves can influence the mental health of children. Some of the debate so far has focused too much on the outside influences on children coming into school. Today I will focus on aspects of the current schooling system that exacerbate that problem.

Let us look at the scale of the issue. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children says that the number of schools seeking help from mental health services is up by more than a third in the last three years. The number of referrals to NHS child and adolescent mental health services by schools seeking professional help for a student was 34,757 in 2017-18. That is the equivalent of 183 every school day. To say that this is anything other than a crisis would be wrong. We are facing a crisis of mental health issues in our schools.

The National Education Union further found that 49% of education staff said that secondary school pupils had been suicidal as a result of the stress that they were under, and more than half of professionals surveyed said that funding for support for pupils’ mental health in schools was inadequate.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. In my constituency of Barnsley East the local clinical commissioning group has been working with schools to try to embed support in a project called “MindSpace”. Does she agree that projects such as MindSpace that get trained counsellors into school, to be there every day, need more funding?

[Layla Moran]

I thank the hon. Lady for her contribution. Funding is part of it, but a number of interventions are taking place in schools, and they have to be critically evaluated. We have to look at the evidence to see whether they work. To my knowledge, only one—the Bounce Forward intervention programme—has been shown to have had a positive impact. I am not saying that the intervention that she mentioned does not, but we need to be careful that what we are doing in schools works. It is incumbent on the Government to ensure that that critical evaluation happens.

--- Later in debate ---

[Layla Moran]

I completely agree. In fact, I would argue that if mental health is the Cinderella service in the NHS, children’s mental health is the Cinderella of the Cinderella service. That is brought into stark relief by child and adolescent mental health services across the country, although I will focus on Oxfordshire. My postbag is full of letters from parents who are desperate to get their children to CAMHS for all sorts of reasons. We have to remember that CAMHS is there for the most acute mental health needs; it does not cover the mild to moderate needs that so desperately need solving in school at an early, preventive stage. In Oxfordshire, children can wait for a referral for up to two years; extraordinarily, they are then often pushed back.

The Education Policy Institute reports that the number of referrals to specialist children’s mental health services has increased by 26% over the past five years, although the school population has increased by 3%. Something is clearly going on, whether it is lack of early intervention in schools or increased pressure.

[Stephanie Peacock]

Does the hon. Lady agree that it is quite concerning that people need to be in absolute crisis even to get a referral? Often young people need to be suicidal before they can get a referral. That is absolutely shocking. Surely earlier intervention would be much better.

[Layla Moran]

I completely agree. It is especially shocking with respect to issues such as depression and eating disorders. Parents seek referrals, but when—after a waiting time of six months at the very least—they see a professional, they are told, “I’m sorry, but your daughter’s not sick enough.” They despair, because they do not know what to do any more. We need a much more joined-up service. A lot of these things are picked up in schools, so schools have a part to play.

There is a lack of resources for CAMHS across the country, and unfortunately the new commissioning service is not going to solve it. The funding problem for mental health services shows that we do not have parity of esteem between mental health and physical services; I know that the Government want it, but they cannot pretend that it has happened. If they say that children’s mental health is a priority within that, I ask people to look at the evidence given to the Public Accounts Committee’s inquiry into children’s mental health services and see for themselves that that is absolutely not the case. The Government know that there is not enough money for CAMHS.

The EPI study further points out that as many as a quarter of local authorities have phased out vital support services around schools, including school-based mental health services, family counselling and support for those living with domestic abuse. The median waiting time for treatment is 60 days, but I am well aware of many constituents who have had to wait as long as two years. That is extraordinary.

Last but not least, I want to discuss the impact of cuts, particularly on local government and on the support available in the wider community. As we know, schools never exist in a vacuum. As today’s Ofsted annual report points out, schools cannot fix everything, but for a lot of children they are often where the buck stops. Cuts elsewhere in the system, particularly in local government, have a massive impact.

I have secured quite a number of debates in Westminster Hall, but of all of them, this debate attracted the most responses when I tweeted about it. I would like to share one with hon. Members, from Vanessa Whitcombe, headteacher at Castle Manor Academy:

“Just emailing following your Facebook post regarding tomorrow’s debate. We are trying so hard to prioritise mental health and wellbeing in schools, applying for grants, paying for school nurse service as ours has been withdrawn, participating in Anna Freud school mental health award, peer mentoring programmes, reducing workload for teachers and putting in wellbeing support, and we are really proud of the small steps we are taking forward. But they are small, as they are against a backdrop of dwindling external services and decreasing budgets. External service provision and early help is only available at such a high threshold we feel like we are firefighting, and it is the most vulnerable children and families that are not accessing what they need. Amanda Spielman spoke wisely of the need for schools to be able to stick to their core business, and in our school we try to make sure that classroom teachers are able to do that as much as possible, but the surrounding investment that is needed to be put in to safeguarding, emotional support, educating parents, feeding students is not going to go away without more provision outside school.”

We have seen that for ourselves in Oxfordshire. Every single one of the children’s centres in my constituency was closed by the Conservative county council, and the more than 40 across Oxfordshire have fallen to just eight. We were able to help families in children’s centres, at an early stage, before there were problems. I have not even started to go on about youth services and youth provision and the issues there. All the wraparound services for young people have gone from the local community, and that leads to all sorts of issues. It is not just about social media—in fact, there is some evidence to show that a little bit of social media for teenagers is a good thing, although a lot is very definitely a bad thing. The debate often focuses too much on that point and less on the much more intractable issues that surround the child.

In conclusion, I believe that this is an issue of deep concern. Even on a day such as today, when the shenanigans of Parliament might make us forget that there are big issues in the country, this is one of the biggest issues we have, and I am concerned that the Government response is simply a sticking plaster. What they are not doing is looking at the core issues that are driving the problem. Unless they do that, they are always going to be playing catch-up; I am not convinced that the laudable aims in the White Paper are actually deliverable. We need to change the culture in schools. We need to stop the pressures on young people. I am grateful in advance for the contributions from other Members, because I am sure that I have missed many of those issues out of my speech.

It is time for change. I am so proud that my party has managed to take a massive step forward in our conference debates. The issue I had in my early years of teaching was under a Labour Government. That has happened again and has got much worse under a Conservative Government. I am not blaming anyone; we have reinforced bad practice across the political spectrum. It is time that we made it stop. This is our next generation and there is nothing more important than that.

Cost of School Uniforms

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Frank Field]

It is very good giving way, because these are points that I would have made otherwise. I merely underscore the point my hon. Friend has just made about how it may not be a one-off set of costs but an increasing set of costs through the year. Of course, if someone has young lads, who are all too often separated from their uniform and their games kit, the costs mount tremendously.

In preparing for this debate, we had a Feeding Birkenhead meeting a couple of weeks ago, and we talked about this debate. There were 22 mothers in the room who support Feeding Birkenhead. Practically all of them were either grandparents or parents. They all said, “We can actually give you examples,” and all of them have given me examples. There have been examples on Facebook—the House of Commons Facebook for these matters has got a huge number of responses from parents. I said that, during this debate, I would do what Ernest Bevin did when he appeared before the wages committee for dockers, where he laid out how much food the dockers would get from their wages and asked the independent panel if it thought that was adequate. One mother listed the cost of the uniform—I will hold the document up so the camera can see it. I will give it to the Minister afterwards—I do not expect him to read it now, but I jolly well hope it is going into the camera.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, and I congratulate him on securing this important debate. I, too, have had a number of examples from across my constituency. A school uniform often costs in excess of £120 in Barnsley East. Does he agree—I know he does—that that is totally unacceptable? We need to look at ways to bring down the costs. Perhaps one way to do so is for governing bodies and local authorities to use their power to bulk buy.

[Frank Field]

All these ideas are here for the Minister to pick up and run with, particularly given that he has the Prime Minister’s support on this issue.

Some of the parents who wrote to me from Birkenhead and beyond have bills that are £300-plus for a school uniform, and they also face the devastating cost of games kits. I hold up another document from a mother, listing a games kit. When my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) saw it, she jumped and said, “Look at that—emblems are being put on the items, which adds enormously to the cost.” That parent—a young woman—has a child in school who has to have two different games kit cases to bring the stuff to school.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those comments. As she hints, we have appointed a strong sponsor for Whitehaven Academy that is already driving forward improvements, backed by substantial funding to improve teaching, resources and the school estate at that school. The overwhelming majority of academies tell a positive story of driving up standards, and the latest published accounts show no regularity exceptions, as they are called, for more than 95% of trusts. The Education and Skills Funding Agency has learned from the experience of the Bright Tribe Trust and other cases, and has made improvements.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

T2. Before the recess, the Minister promised me in a written answer that the Carillion apprentices would be supported to find new placements and continue to be paid in the meantime, but just days after the House rose, hundreds were laid off. What will she now do to honour her commitment and support all these victims of corporate failure?

[The Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills (Anne Milton)]

The Construction Industry Training Board has worked with all 1,148 apprentices. For 776 of them, the issue has been resolved and they have got training places and employers, for 225 we are still looking to find a match for them, and 147 have failed to respond following repeated attempts to get in touch with them. The Construction Industry Training Board should be congratulated on what it has done. It has used letters, emails and texts—every way possible—to get hold of those 147, and it is to be praised.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

We are introducing a baseline assessment so that we can measure the progress that all pupils make in their time at primary school, and that will be based very much on assessment and observation.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

Northern College has recently started teaching a pioneering 10-week course to help survivors of modern slavery. Will the Secretary of State join me in paying tribute to the work of Northern College? Will he also meet me to discuss its difficulty in using public funds to fund these vital courses because of current immigration regulations?

[Damian Hinds]

Of course I will meet the hon. Lady, and I pay tribute to what she is doing to make sure that the survivors and victims of modern slavery are given all the opportunities possible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Anne Milton]

It was a delight to launch the careers strategy last week. Its spine will be the Gatsby benchmarks, which are critical. The pilot in the north-east demonstrated just how much progress we can make if schools meet all those targets.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

Class sizes in Barnsley are above the national average. As a former teacher, I know the impact that that can have. Does the Secretary of State accept that it has a detrimental impact on pupils?

[Justine Greening]

As we have heard routinely today, school standards in England are rising. In the end, that is what parents care about. There are 1.9 million more children in better primary and secondary schools, and the phonics check is improving literacy outcomes tremendously. It would be good if Opposition Members welcomed that for once.

Sanitary Products

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Layla Moran]

Yes, I share the hon. Lady’s frustration. I hope we will hear something different on this important issue from the Minister.

Food banks are now actively asking for donations of sanitary products. Teachers are dipping into their own pockets to keep supplies of sanitary products in their desks.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

As a former teacher, I have heard lots of stories from teachers about keeping a supply of sanitary products in the classroom so that girls do not miss out on education because of poverty. Does the hon. Lady agree that that should not be the responsibility of teachers? The Government should do something. The Secretary of State for Education is also Minister for Women and Equalities.