My Lords, I want to raise some qualms about this set of amendments. For different reasons, I find myself agreeing with the way the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just raised some issues.
I have spoken, on earlier amendments, about my concern about pathologising and medicalising all sorts of everyday experiences for children and adolescents. If we see the trials and tribulations of growing up— goodness knows, there are many of them—too much through the prism of mental health, we can contribute to children being anxious and worried about their own mental health. There is a kind of danger that we make
children self-absorbed or unable to get over things and undermine their resilience. Important work has been done on this. One of my favourite books is The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education by Professors Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, which was ahead of its time in worrying about some of these issues and raising them. There is a whole body of research on this work.
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I started my professional career many decades ago as a mental health social worker before I became a teacher in further education. At that time working in mental health, I watched the expansion of what constituted a mental illness. Many people in the world of psychiatry and psychology are concerned about this. One thing the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said was that it is early days with some of this. We have to be a bit careful and think about what we are doing when kids look as though they are stressed out—though obviously there are problems.
For example, we know that there has been, particularly among young girls and adolescents, an outbreak of self-harm. There is a real problem there; it is a kind of social contagion, and then we think that they need CAMHS support. On the other hand, there has also been a slight social contagion of gender dysphoria—certainly in many schools, among a lot of young women—but we are not allowed to say that that is a mental health problem because it apparently would be a form of bigotry. I suggest a certain modesty here in finding out where we are at.
We also have to be a bit honest with ourselves and say that maybe one of the greatest scandals of abandoning the young in recent times, and a real failure of safeguarding, has been that we closed down schools so much during lockdown—it was in and out, on and off. It was obvious what the consequences would be. There was collateral damage: the virus itself was not so much of a threat to young people but they suffered the consequences of two years of not knowing what they were doing—again, I recommend that people read the new UsforThem book The Children’s Inquiry, which includes a lot of evidence. That was what led to a lot of the problematic aspects of the Bill being rushed through —a panic about children not being in school and all the rest of it. This area requires great thought and a careful look at the research. We should certainly not rush in and it should certainly not be part of the Bill.
My final point is that, honestly, the idea of Ofsted inspections being asked to judge the mental health of the student body is traumatising even thinking of it. For any of us who have been in education, we know that the biggest dilemma for teachers is that they have to pass on a body of knowledge—a millennia of knowledge. You never know what to do. The curriculum arguments would be the bits that are the best of what is known and thought. Then there is the modern world: which bits do you pass on to young people? That is our obligation as educators, but you spend the whole time thinking that you have to cut out loads of stuff.
My concern is that if the purpose of schools becomes too embroiled in the therapeutic, we will end up never educating any young people. That would be bad for their physical and mental health, and certainly for
their educational development. That is what schools should be for, without being insensitive to some of the mental health challenges of the day.