Young People’s Mental Health

Debate between Tim Loughton and Ruth Cadbury

Thursday 27th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady and I have the same objective, but I am always sceptical about a solution that means making something another compulsory part of the curriculum. Sex and relationship education is an interesting case in point. Some of the best SRE that I have seen has been from outside youth workers and others who can empathise with young people and talk to them in a way that they will appreciate, respect and learn from. Making it another subject taught by Mrs Miggins the geography teacher, who happens to have a free period on a Thursday afternoon and so can be in charge that term, can cause problems. More schools should automatically want to have well-informed mental health education in whatever form is appropriate to engage their children. It is in their children’s best interests. I do not think that my objective differs from the hon. Lady’s, but we can have a debate about how we can most effectively achieve it.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about the importance of having appropriate, properly trained, empathetic people—specialists—delivering mental health education to young people. He suggests that youth services could provide such education. The problem is that local authorities are cutting those services because they are non-statutory. Many schools that have been providing support and bringing in specialist experts to help young people and teachers in this curriculum area are also facing cuts. Headteachers are having to pare back services as they deal with reduced budgets.

[Tim Loughton]

I hear what the hon. Lady is saying and that is a subject for another debate. It is an issue on which I have campaigned for many years, and indeed I chaired a commission looking into the role of youth workers in schools. Some really good examples of best practice are available, often in academies, which have appreciated the value of youth workers, because they can empathise with young people better, and brought them into schools. That is missing in so many other places. I have been advocating giving other roles to youth workers, who, sadly, are no longer being employed, particularly in local authorities, because this is not a statutory requirement and therefore has fallen by the wayside. So I have a deal of sympathy with that view, but it is for another day and debate.

I wish briefly to deal with a couple more points, the first of which relates to the last one: the importance of resilience and character education in the well being agenda in schools. Recent Education Secretaries have begun to take that on board, and a lot of this subject lies within that area. Another issue to consider is how this is monitored, and another good recommendation in the report is that Ofsted should have a role in that. Ofsted now has a role in assessing behaviour in schools, but that should extend to how it copes with mental health problems among pupils—that should be on the checklist. We are really bad in this country at disseminating good practice, but I have seen many examples of it. I recall visiting a school in Stafford and sitting in on some of the sessions held by their full-time counsellor. The teachers had confidence in her, would refer to her children about whom they had some doubts, and the children would speak frankly to her. Such people can prevent a lot of problems from occurring later on in the schools that have them, but not enough schools do—again, there is a debate to be had about why that is.

We also have to address the issue of cyber-bullying and the role of social media. The report gives examples about websites that promote self-harm, which are a huge scourge. We need to be much more aggressive in tackling these sites, particularly where they relate to anorexia and self-harm. People are going to them to seek advice and find a solution because they have feelings about self-harm or problems with anorexia, but these bizarre websites are promoting those things. As the report suggests, we need some form of verification scheme and, as has been mentioned, a much more responsible and bigger role for our social media companies. They are huge companies employing many thousands of people, yet the numbers in their scrutiny and enforcement departments are woefully low. As Members of Parliament with Twitter accounts, most of us have blue ticks to show we are who we say we are. Can there not be some form of verification scheme, described in the report as a “kitemarking scheme”, so that young people, particularly those who are vulnerable and impressionable, have confidence that the sites they are accessing are there to give them support, not to encourage them to do harmful things to themselves? This applies to so many different areas, including in respect of radicalisation sites.

Body image has been mentioned, and Girlguiding, which regularly revisits the issue of body image and young girls’ perceptions, has recently produced a report on the subject. It is always so alarming and petrifying to see the number of young girls as young as 13 whose aspiration is to have plastic surgery. Despite the fact that their bodies are not even fully formed and that they are still growing up mentally, they are being conditioned to think that this is the ideal to which they must aspire. That is wrong, and these influences on our young people are at the root of so many of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities leading to mental illness and, in the most tragic cases, to suicide. In the old days, a note passed across a classroom with the words “Sealed with a loving kiss” might, at worst, end up on a playground floor. At the worst extremes, in the case of a form of sexting, the equivalent these days goes viral and ends up on social media in perpetuity, where it is open for millions of people to see. That is the difference between the note in our playground days and the casual, ill-advised text on social media these days.

Finally, the report makes recommendations about young people wanting to relate to people their own age, rather than old men in suits, which I guess takes in quite a few of the hon. Members here today. [Interruption.] Okay, I was talking about myself and my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak. They say that taking such an approach makes it easier to receive the right message, hence the recommendation that

“a consultation group of young people, both with and without a mental health history, be set up to work on and contribute to the anti-stigma campaign, and that someone is identified to ensure this happens.”

I completely agree with that.

My final point is that when I was a children’s Minister, I had four reference groups within the Department for Education, each of which came to me on a three-monthly basis: one comprised children who had been adopted; one comprised children in foster care; one comprised children in residential care homes; and one comprised children who had recently left care. They came to me in the Department without adults, we sat around the table and they told me exactly what was going on. They challenged some received wisdoms, and I got some of the best information that I ever got from any experts by speaking to those young people. This report has been produced by young people and by reference to many thousands of young people, many of whom have suffered and are suffering the sorts of problems that I and many other hon. Members have mentioned today. We need to listen to the voice of these young people, to act on their recommendations, and to include and involve them in the solutions. That is why this report is so important to them, but it needs to be equally as important to us, to this House and to this Government.