My Lords, the Schools Bill clearly supports the Prime Minister’s ambition to improve schooling for all children and to even out spending across education. In looking at evening up spending, an important area is left very uneven—the provision of mental health services for children. It is extremely varied across the country, as we know, and is currently at the stage where schools have an expectation that there is a mental health lead in the school, but no particular separate counsellor at this stage, and no provision or funding for a counsellor for children.
Every generation of schoolchildren has its own challenges, but by far the biggest challenge for this generation of schoolchildren is mental health. Opinions vary as to why that is the case, but the situation is running very strong in schools at the moment. The Bill as currently configured, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and others have noticed, makes no provision for mental health. At the very heart of an even approach across education that will secure fairness and equality for children, there needs to be much stronger provision and a much more direct approach—and, frankly, urgent access to counsellors in schools. As we know, the current position is that, in extreme situations, children are passed across to CAMHS in the NHS. But it is completely impossible that CAMHS will have sufficient capacity—and it never will have sufficient capacity. The problem lies in schools, and the schools need more support.
Beyond getting children back into school—obviously the Bill reflects where we are post pandemic—and making sure that they are all in some form of education, and I welcome the provisions to make sure that that is the case, the Bill provides some degree of support for well-being and mental health. But beyond that there is another set of problems in secondary schools at the moment, and it is another area that we should look at
urgently, certainly while the Schools Bill is making its progress. It is the area of eating disorders and gender. In that area, schools are facing a bewildering set of issues that arise and are passed to teachers, who often have very limited training and limited ability to handle the situation.
The legal environment around this is still somewhat ambiguous. Despite the Education Act 1996, which provides that parents should always be involved, and despite the Equality Act 2010, which should always ensure that there is a balanced discussion of difficult topics within a school environment, the legal environment is very difficult for schools. In this position, teachers face a bewildering set of issues, and children are finding all manner of ways in which to make life quite difficult in schools. Teachers therefore experience a situation in which women’s rights and privacy is eroded, parents’ participation is neglected and free speech is ignored. In this environment, teachers in schools need much stronger guidance from the department and from Ofsted. That is another area that we might take a look at.
I do welcome the Bill. It is extremely important that we even up spending for all children—but, in the current environment in schools, part of that should be about addressing mental health. As a matter of urgency in secondary schools, and in particular to protect the needs of teenage girls, we should look very quickly and urgently at the legal environment around these gender, self-harm and depression issues.
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