Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on securing this important debate and thank all noble Lords for their contributions. I feel a long letter coming on, so I will do my best to cover the points raised, but I feel pretty confident that I will not get through all of them.

I felt very uncomfortable and was trying not to be defensive while listening to the opening speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the other speeches. What I heard from your Lordships today is what I often hear going around the country, which is that “My school, my children’s school, my grandchildren’s school and the school I teach in are fantastic” but “the system is broken”. “The system” is made up of all those brilliant schools, with brilliant teachers and a heroic generation of children, and I think at our peril do we have such a negative tone about our education system and our schools, which are doing an amazing job all around the country.

There are many reasons why they are doing so well, but I will pick just on a few. The first is that this country has been the first to really be led by the evidence of what works—not what we think or feel might work but what the evidence actually shows works in the country. All of us in this House know that it is a great deal easier to write policy than it is to implement it well, and the focus that has been placed on what actually works in practice is absolutely critical. I encourage your Lordships to look at the difference in what is happening in our schools in England and those in Scotland and in Wales, and I think my case rests.

We used evidence in relation to curriculum and extracurricular activities, and in relation to pedagogy and behaviour. For those noble Lords who question the importance of attainment, that in itself is an incredibly important protective factor for our children’s mental health. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, talked about a sense of music and other cultural activities having been lost in our schools. As your Lordships know—I mention it often at the Dispatch Box, because it is true—every week I visit schools and I see what is happening on the ground.

The noble Baroness talked about schools being forced into trusts. The schools that go into trusts because they are sponsored schools have failed the community of children that they are serving and, for whatever reasons, therefore need support. I am well aware that parents, children and staff are frequently concerned at the time of transfer, but they should visit those schools a year later. I went to a school in Liverpool and a year to the day since they had been sponsored, I said to the children, “Tell me what it was like a year ago. What’s the difference?” A child said to me, “You wouldn’t have felt safe in the corridor, Miss”. Our children need to feel safe, not only in the corridor. She also talked about what mountains she was going to climb, metaphorically, so it was not just about corridors.

I want to pick up on the sense of this very critical and forbidding tone that your Lordships suggest that schools apparently use in communicating with parents and children. Again, I absolutely understand that there are times when enforcement is important, but everything we are doing and everything that I see in schools starts with support and encouragement to work out where a child will thrive and flourish, and what their individual strengths are that can be built on. I sense that the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, had the same sense when she met the children from the Ark school the other day. I will do my very best to ensure that they get a speedy response to their letter.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, talked about attendance. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for underlining how attendance is so important for the safety of our children. I urge those noble Lords who are worried about the policy in relation to fines: look at the guidance that we have produced for schools and its emphasis on support. I urge them to talk to schools. Their concern, when I talk to them, is about inconsistency in the implementation of fines for non-attendance rather than the policy itself.

I absolutely agree that mild anxiety becomes much greater anxiety for the majority of children if they miss significant amounts of school, so we are working incredibly hard on attendance. For the most vulnerable children, we have extended our attendance mental programme and we will have 32 attendance hubs, meaning that 2,000 schools will be helped to tackle persistent absence with that peer-to-peer support. We are also doing a great deal of work analysing the data around attendance. As I said in response to a Question earlier this week, we are seeing green shoots in relation to attendance this term, particularly in primary but also in year 7 in secondary.

I always enjoy listening to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and her reflections on education. We need to focus on what schools can do and not ask them to do things they cannot do. The noble Baroness talked about giving confidence back to children, but we also need to make sure that teachers and school leaders feel confident in their approach.

I turn to some of the wider issues in the debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, anticipated well that I would acknowledge that there has been a worrying rise in mental health issues that need specialist support. Of course, teachers and school staff are not mental health specialists. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, referred to the rollout of mental health support teams. We are extending those teams to an estimated 44% of pupils and learners by the end of this financial year and to at least 50% by the end of March 2025. To address the noble Earl’s question, our original plans have been accelerated, but these are genuinely new and additional staff, so it takes time to recruit and train them, but we see this as an absolute priority.

This debate shows how crucial it is that we support schools. We also recognise that they have a real role in creating a safe, calm and supportive environment for pupils, where they want to attend and where they are able to learn and flourish. That is particularly important for the most vulnerable children. Here I acknowledge the remarks of the noble Baronesses, Lady Tyler and Lady Hollins, whom I thank for all the work she does, particularly in relation to children with learning difficulties.

Our schools’ role in promoting this environment and offering a rich and varied experience that encourages the creativity that your Lordships talked about, the activity and development, through a broad and balanced curriculum, and a high-quality enrichment offer, is incredibly important. Schools are and should be places where children can experience joy—it does not say “fun” in my speech, but I agree about fun—find good and respectful communities, and have experiences that build their resilience and sense of well-being.

The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, asked how we can flex that to make sure that it always reflects particular needs and individual pupils. That is rooted in having a culture that watches out for every child, every day, and makes sure that the relationships that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about are in place, so that children feel able to come forward and talk and teachers can spot their needs.

Good behaviour is critical to ensuring a safe environment that children will feel happy to go to. That is why the Government have put such emphasis on high expectations of behaviour. Many of your Lordships quoted the Children’s Commissioner and I know from speaking to her that it is particularly children with special educational needs and disabilities or children who are vulnerable who need to feel safe in school. They thrive when they feel safe in school. School leaders with whom I have talked emphasise that it is not just in lessons but, crucially, in unstructured time—when the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, is standing by the edge of the playground, spotting stuff—when children need to feel safe and need to know absolutely what the expectations are of their behaviour.

Also, on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, children need to feel that they have a part in this and a sense of agency. The noble Lord referred to the work of Place2Be, which I know well and admire even more. That sense of pupil leadership councils and so on contributing to the culture of a school, particularly around behaviour, is extremely important. We have set those things out in our behaviour guidance; established behaviour hubs, which are supporting 750 schools; and introduced a behaviour and culture national professional qualification for teachers.

A number of your Lordships, including my noble friends Lord Sterling and Lord Wei, spoke about children with special educational needs. They are right that we absolutely need to emphasise earlier identification. We are working to reduce the adversarial nature of the system and are putting in support for school staff, integrating in the initial teacher training and the early careers framework a much greater focus on special educational needs and disabilities in teacher training. The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, spoke about speech and language, which is an important area of focus and obviously one of the priority areas for the practice guidance in the SEND improvement plan. I would be delighted to meet with Speech and Language UK.

My noble friend Lord Sterling and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, among others, spoke about access to CAMHS. The young people’s mental health workforce has increased by 46% since the NHS long-term plan started in 2019, but I absolutely accept your Lordships’ reflections, and the feedback I get when I talk to schools, that that may have increased but schools still feel that it is a very hard service to access.

I turn to enrichment. The department is committed to ensuring that young people have access to great extracurricular opportunities. The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, talked about the importance of partnerships. She will know that we are testing ways to increase local co-ordination of enrichment activities across schools through our enrichment partnerships pilot, which is a giant project between the Department for Education and DCMS. That is in addition to our work with DCMS to make sure that children get the most from the national youth guarantee, which supports children to have access to regular out-of-school activities. In particular, we are working together to offer the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award to all mainstream secondary schools in England by 2025, which perhaps offers some of the blood, sweat and tears that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, referred to—hopefully no violence, though.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester spoke about the importance of cultural education, as did my noble friend Lord Vaizey. That is obviously part of a rich school experience, including wider arts, music and creative subjects. That is why we are investing £115 million in cultural education up to 2025.

Turning to sport, I absolutely hear the importance that my noble friend Lord Effingham and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, place on sport. We are going to publish non-statutory guidance this spring, illustrating how schools will be able to provide two hours of PE and equal access. As someone who swam in very cold water this morning and tries to every morning, I totally agree with the noble Lord about the impact on one’s mood. It is hard to get out of cold water without feeling better—unless you stay in too long, of course, but that is for another debate.

The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, raised the importance of school food, as did my noble friend Lord Effingham. I offer the noble Lord a meeting outside the Chamber to update him on some of the work the department is doing on this. We now include cooking and nutrition as part of the national curriculum in design and technology, and it is mandatory in key stages 1 to 3. A new GCSE in food preparation and nutrition was introduced in 2016.

My noble friend Lord Wei asked what we are doing to support home education. We remain committed to introducing statutory local authority registers for children not in school, and a duty for local authorities to provide support for home-educating parents. I absolutely recognise some of the issues he raised relating to children with special educational needs and disabilities.

I will also just mention, in honour of her green genes, that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, knows, we are doing a great deal in schools with our climate change and sustainability strategy, which sets out a number of initiatives from early years, through school and into college that are designed to get children into nature and inspire them by spending time in nature, giving them the tools to plan and develop climate action plans for their school and their community, and then act on them. We really believe that that connection with nature is so important to their mental health.

I think your Lordships will have felt quite how strongly I feel about how much our schools are doing to support our children and their mental health. As your Lordships’ speeches underlined, no single thing will address this problem. There is no silver bullet, but that combination of engaging curricular and extracurricular activities and making sure that we protect avenues for student voice and agency will all contribute, combined with having specialist well-being and mental health support. That needs to be underpinned by a firm and supportive behaviour policy where children feel safe and thrive, and where teachers feel fulfilled.

The bit I really do agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is on Yeats and lighting the fire. We do that through those things and through the relationships that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, alluded to, but unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, I think that is exactly what our schools are doing.