Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Meston Excerpts

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 502YG and pass on the apologies of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, who has had to go but had agreed to introduce the amendment on behalf of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, who cannot take part on the Bill. In summary, the amendment is to improve allergy safety in schools, but it marks the culmination of a long campaign in conjunction with the inspirational Helen Blythe, following the tragic death of her son Benedict in 2021, when he was only five. An inquest last month concluded that Benedict’s death was avoidable and caused by the accidental ingestion of cows’ milk after his school failed to follow the processes and procedures in place to protect him.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey, outlined, almost 20% of all allergic reactions take place in schools and, sadly, we now know that not only do they not necessarily have the EpiPens but they do not necessarily have a plan or training in place. Only putting these protective measures on a statutory footing will ensure that adequate protections are there for the two children in every classroom with allergies. Helen has worked tirelessly to establish the safety measures necessary to ensure that no child is ever lost again in such a tragic and avoidable way. I also pay tribute to the work of Alicia Kearns in the other place, MP for Rutland and Stamford, with which I am connected. Helen Blythe is her constituent.

The current government guidelines do not even mention allergies. There is only one line on food and one link to an anaphylaxis charity. The key aim is of course spare EpiPens, trained staff and a proper policy. The Government would prefer any change to be by way of guidance, but that just does not give the guarantees necessary—hence tonight’s amendment.

Between 1998 and 2018, 66 children died from allergic reactions. There are 680,000 pupils in England’s schools who have allergies—that is one or two per classroom, according to the Benedict Blythe Foundation’s REACT report of March 2024. At a time when the Department for Education is rightly focused on the attendance crisis, children miss half a million days of education due to allergy each year. These adrenaline auto-injections are life-savers, and the Benedict Blythe Foundation estimates that it would cost only £5 million for the rollout in English schools, plus the training. I remember a similar campaign to put defibrillators into every school; that was done, so why not put these EpiPens, and proper training and policy, in place? I welcome the department’s engagement, but the time for action is now.

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I want to underline, in respect of Amendment 462, the importance of the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, about reducing the pressures on CAMHS. The family courts are being frustrated, as I know from recent experience, and impeded in reaching necessary long-term decisions about the future for children. They are told, week by week, that they are waiting for an appointment with CAMHS and then that they are waiting for an assessment report from CAMHS—and then that they are waiting for the recommended treatment to take place. If Amendment 462 serves to help with those tasks, children, their parents and the courts will benefit. The courts are being criticised for the delays in reaching decisions, and certainly the problems with CAMHS contribute to those delays.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I really want to challenge the assumption of some of the amendments in this group that what we need is more dedicated mental health practices and provision in schools. One of the problems is that there is too much emphasis on mental illness and mental health in education at the moment. That awareness is taking up too much time in school life, is over-preoccupying young people and is becoming a real problem.

If you look at what is going on in schools at the moment, there are indeed endless numbers of staff, volunteers and organisations with responsibility for emotional well-being: mental health leads, support teams, emotional literacy support and assistance, mental health first aiders, counsellors, and well-being officers. If you go into any school, the walls are covered in information about mental illness, mental health and so on; it is everywhere you go. Yet despite this booming, school-based mental health industrial complex, almost, the well-being of pupils continues to deteriorate—or that is what we are told.

Mental health problems and diagnoses are rising at the same time as all the awareness initiatives are taking place. Something is going wrong and that at least needs some investigation, but these amendments just assume that we should carry on doing the same and more of the same. Along with the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, I think that real, critical thinking needs to be done around some of the awareness campaigns.

I want to challenge the idea that schools are the vehicle for tackling the undoubted spiralling crisis of unhappiness among young people. It is also important that we untangle that from the crisis of CAMHS. There is actually a serious problem in NHS mental health support for children, and I would like that to be taken on. That is very different from the kind of discussion we are having here about schools, which is that mental distress becomes such a focus of all the discussions in schools.

I tend to agree—for possibly the only time—with Tony Blair on this. He said,

“you’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life”.

That is true. Starting with children, we are encouraging the young to internalise the narrative of medicalised and pathologised explanations and the psychological vocabulary of adopting an identity of mental fragility, and that is not doing them any good. That can then create an increasing cohort of young people and parents demanding official diagnosis, more intervention and more support at school.

Dr Alastair Santhouse, a neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley, argues this in his new book, No More Normal: Mental Health in an Age of Over-Diagnosis. He says that it has become crucial to reassess what constitutes mental illness, so that we can decide who needs to be treated with limited resources and who can be helped in other ways. He is talking about the NHS, and he warns that the NHS has buckled under a tsunami of referrals for some conditions. He also says that other state services such as schools are straining to the point of dysfunction in dealing with this issue, and I tend to agree with him.

I admire the passionate intervention by the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, calling for measurement and evidence, but one of the problems is that I am not entirely sure we know what we are measuring. There is no clear definition of well-being to measure. The psychiatric profession is making the point that the definitions of what constitutes mental illness are now contended—there are arguments about them. What are you measuring? This woolliness of definitions is becoming a problem in schools.

The counsellor Lucy Beney, in her excellent recent pamphlet, worries that this means that mental illness in schools is leading to a kind of diagnostic inflation itself, as pupils compare notes on what they have got and go to different professionals to ask what they have got and so on. It can create a sort of social or cultural contagion, enticing the young to see all the ups and downs of life through the prism of mental health, which can be demoralising and counterproductive. There is no doubt that too many children and young people are not thriving mentally and emotionally in the UK today, and I would like to have that discussion, but I do not think that well-being and mental health is necessarily the way to do it. Schools are definitely not the places to solve it.

A lot of the well-being initiatives, counselling and therapeutic interventions encourage young people to look at life through the subjective filter of their own feelings and anxieties. That, in turn, is likely to lead to inward-looking, self-absorbed children. The role of education in schools is to introduce new generations to the wonders of the millennia, of knowledge outside their experience, which takes them outside themselves. That is what schools are for. That is what teachers are good at. It is not just about gaining credentials. In fact, I hate the credentialing aspect of it. But if you get into a brilliant novel, the law of physics, the history of our world or evolution, you forget your troubles. If you are constantly talking to the counsellor about your troubles, yourself and endlessly thinking of your own well-being, it is boring, demoralising and stunting. It is enough to make anybody depressed, including the young. It is important that schools do not get completely obsessed with this issue. I fear that they have, and it has made matters worse.