Mental Health Education in Schools

Debate between Robert Halfon and James Morris

Monday 6th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[James Morris]

I definitely agree with my right hon. Friend on that. As I said, the family is the crucible. The issue is often very complex, and the relationship between the family and the school is a critical part of what we are discussing because, again, families can be a place where therapy is very effective, and can be a very effective way of helping the child and making them resilient, so I very much agree with my right hon. Friend’s point.

[Robert Halfon]

Could I add just one qualification? Children with mental health difficulties may be experiencing significant family breakdown and may not be able to have the family involved, and therefore the school is literally the one place that can really help the child. That goes back to what my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) and others said about teacher training and a young person being able to go to someone in the school who can actually look after that student.

[James Morris]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. I totally agree: clearly, it will not be possible to involve the family in all cases. I have seen examples in my constituency, particularly in the primary school environment, in which headteachers and teachers have taken really interesting and creative decisions to replicate the family environment for children who have not been brought up in a stable family environment and have not entered primary school in a properly socialised way. They have replicated the family environment and tried to create those kinds of structures because they have been absent, so I completely agree with my right hon. Friend on that.

Other hon. Members have talked about CAMHS and I want to make a few comments about early intervention. If you look at the spectrum of what we are talking about, it could be argued that by the time children get to school any mental distress and difficulties they suffer from will have been baked in for many years. There has been a debate about early intervention and mental health for years; it is what I would call a policy no-brainer. Everybody agrees we should intervene earlier. Everybody agrees that in principle that is a good thing. Yet we are still debating about whether we are doing it sufficiently well and how it should be done. The truth is that we should shift resources to where the evidence points us.

The evidence points to the joint Green Paper on children’s health and education, and adolescent mental health, which other hon. Members have mentioned. The evidence suggests that interventions at an early age, sometimes pre-primary school, are the most effective interventions that we can make on a therapeutic level. From the evidence, it looks like working with children from birth to the age of two, working with families, and working with parents is the most effective intervention we can possibly make. I urge the Minister to be bold in terms of what we will do in that Green Paper. If we can do only one or two things from that Green Paper, we should focus on the really important one, which is shifting resources to genuinely effective early intervention based on evidence. Everything else we have talked about, such as mental health first aid and so on, has a role to play in this debate, but it will not solve the problem we are trying to confront. We will solve this problem by focusing a lot more resources in a laser-like way on early intervention—even before school. That is the critical part of this debate. The one bold move for the Government would be to focus their attention on that. Then we might be able to make significant progress.

Other hon. Members have mentioned CAMHS. If we were designing a child and adolescent mental health service today, we would not design it in the way it currently operates. We have had several reviews of CAMHS over the last decade. Other hon. Members have mentioned Future in Mind, the CQC has just done its review and there have been other reviews. We know that CAMHS is currently not fit for purpose. That is not to say that people working in CAMHS are not doing an excellent job in delivering the services they do, but we need a more integrated service. We need to move away from the tiering approach, which means we concentrate on tier four—that is children with the most severe mental illness. If we can get rid of this metaphor of tiering and focus on access to the appropriate level of care required by a child or young person in a place appropriate to them and deal with it across the spectrum, and integrate it with initiatives that are being taken in schools and the initiatives I have been talking about in relation to early intervention, we can make significant progress.

We have come a long way. People use the word “crisis,” which I am always very wary of using. It is not as if this crisis started today. The debate about children and young people’s mental health has been going on since about 1962 when Enoch Powell, then the Public Health Minister, made the decision that we would no longer put people in asylums but would move towards a community model. That was in 1961 or 1962. We are only now beginning to have a real debate about how we really tackle some of the underlying issues that we face in society in terms of the mental health of children and young people. We are much better at talking about it, but the debate actually is only just beginning and the Government have an opportunity to take some really bold steps, which would have a lasting legacy.