Government’s Education Catch-up and Mental Health Recovery Programmes

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effectiveness of the Government’s education catch-up and mental health recovery programmes.

I thank the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) for coming to the Backbench Business Committee to secure the debate. The impact of covid-19 on education has been nothing short of a national disaster for our children. Lockdowns and school closures for most children have heralded the four horsemen of the education apocalypse: a widening attainment gap, a mental health epidemic, increased safeguarding hazards and damage to life chances. Even prior to the pandemic, disadvantaged pupils were already 18 months of learning behind their better-off peers by the time of GCSEs, and only yesterday The Times newspaper, as part of its education commission, reported that 25% fewer poorer pupils achieve English and maths GCSEs compared with their wealthier peers.

Today I would like to focus on three key issues affecting children’s recovery. First, I will start with the ghost children. On Sunday, the respected Centre for Social Justice published a new report, “Lost but not forgotten”, which continues to highlight the worrying situation of the over 100,000 children—and the number is increasing—who have mostly not returned to school since schools were reopened last year. Across the country, 758 schools are missing almost an entire class-worth of children. About 500 children are missing in half of all local authorities across the country. The Government want exams to go ahead, which I agree with, but 13,000 children in a critical exam year

“are most likely to be severely absent.”

As my Education Committee heard from a headteacher last week:

“Pupils need to be physically in school to even start to learn.”

However, the effects of persistent absence go well beyond academic progress. The CSJ again points out that while

“school attendance is not a panacea, it…offers opportunities to detect wrongdoing and intervene much earlier.”

This would prevent safeguarding concerns from escalating and would provide the families with the support they need when they need it. We only need to remember the tragic cases of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson to realise this truth.

Of course, I welcome the Government’s recent announcements

“to tackle the postcode lottery of avoidable absence”,

but this is no way near enough. The Department for Education must prioritise gathering live data about who and where these children are—the data is absolutely crucial—and I urge the Government to use any underspend from the national tutoring programme, as the Centre for Social Justice has recommended, to fund 2,000 attendance advisers to work on the ground to find these children, work with the families and get the children back into school. Charles Dickens wrote in “Oliver Twist”

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for the important points he is making. On the issue of mental health, this week the all-party parliamentary group on pandemic response and recovery had evidence from psychologists of long standing in the field, indicating that one of the greatest causes of stress and mental health problems in young children at school was the continual testing that takes place for covid. Does he accept that, given the way the virus is now moving, we must look at whether such extensive testing is needed, evaluate its significance anyhow, and address this issue, which is putting many children off even wanting to go to school?

As so often, the right hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point. My view has always been that we seem to be putting burdens on children all the time, when they are at low risk—thank goodness—from covid, yet we do not do the same to adults. It is children who have really suffered during this pandemic. We have all let them down through some of the policies that have been implemented. I understand why that was done, but our children have really struggled, so I have sympathy for what he says.

I thank the Chair of the Education Committee for his excellent speech. I agree with him on many of the points he raises. As he knows, I chair the all-party parliamentary group for school exclusions and alternative provision, and we had a meeting just this morning with professionals in that area. There is a crisis in AP at the moment, due to the sheer numbers of young people who cannot be in mainstream education because of the crisis in mental health that he has just mentioned. Does he agree that it is critical that the Government find funding for high-quality AP and offer more guidance to local authorities on how to use their high needs block to ensure that those much-needed provisions are available now in local communities?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Forty children are excluded every school day and, sadly, they are not ending up in quality alternative provision. There is a postcode lottery, despite the wonderful efforts of many teachers in AP. There needs to be a dramatic change. I would like kids to stay in the school but have support training centres in the school. As Michael Wilshaw, the former head of Ofsted, said to our Committee, there should be many more of them so that kids are not just dumped out into the streets and left, often, to their own devices or to poor-quality provision.

My right hon. Friend knows that he and I have a slight difference of opinion when it comes to the idea of exclusion. However, I always want to be careful about one thing: that we talk about what the school could do. Does he agree that there always needs to be a firm conversation about what more parents can do to support the teachers to ensure that their children do not end up being excluded?

Yes, 100%. I like the message coming out of the Department for Education that this is not just about schools and skills, but families, schools and skills. Families are central to this and we should do everything possible to strengthen them. I welcome the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Government are putting into early intervention, particularly to build family hubs around the country.

Let us look at the horrific statistics on mental health: 17.4% of children aged six to 16 had a probable mental health disorder in 2021, up from 11.6% in 2017. Overall, child mental health referrals are up by 60%, so the Government must rocket-boost their proposals to put a mental health professional in every school, not just in 25% of them. We should also ensure—this perhaps relates to some of the question from my hon. Friend—that interventions to support mental health are not seen as crutches, but designed to prevent more serious escalation.

I have mentioned before in this House my visit to Newham Collegiate Sixth Form Centre, which is an extraordinary school. Staff there do not like the words mental health; they talk about mental health resilience. Throughout school life, pupils are taught the tools and tactics that they need to deal with the challenges that life throws at them. Private study periods have desks set up in an exam style to help pupils to familiarise themselves with the setting to reduce their anxiety, and in school assemblies, pupils learn from sport celebrities about the techniques that they use to deal with high-pressure situations. We need to talk about this in terms of mental health resilience.

We should also tackle the wrecking ball that social media has been to young people’s mental health. The Prince’s Trust found that

“social media use in childhood is associated with worse wellbeing”,

and 78% of Barnardo’s practitioners reported that children between the ages of 10 and 15 have accessed unsuitable or harmful content. The platforms provided by companies such as TikTok, in my view—I am not a luddite; I love technology—are a Trojan horse for damaging children’s lives, not just with their huge amount of sexualised content, but through the damage that they are doing because of the images that children see. There should be a 2% levy on these social media companies, which would create a funding pot of around £100 million that the Government could distribute to schools to provide mental health support and digital skills training to young people to build the resilience and online safety skills that they need.

Order. I expect this debate to take until about half-past three, so there is just over an hour left. I know that Members will want to leave enough time for the Minister to answer their questions and, indeed, for the shadow Minister to speak. I hope that we can manage without a formal time limit. If everyone takes about five minutes, everyone will have an opportunity to speak. If that does not work, I will introduce a time limit.

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon). We have debated this and related issues before, but today’s debate is particularly important to the life chances of our young constituents. If we believe in social mobility and trying to make things better for the next generation than they were for the last, this debate should be at the heart of those ambitions. I agree with a great deal of what the right hon. Gentleman has said, and accept that the Department, and indeed the Government in general, are making some movement in the direction in which I would like to see us go. Certainly there is common ground and much to be discussed between us.

As usual, these matters boil down to “but more needs to be done”. Let me briefly run through the issues that I think are at the heart of this. The education catch-up programme needs to reach into the schools. Eighty per cent. of schools in the north-east of England which responded to a recent survey—I accept that information on this is patchy—said that the Government’s education recovery package was not sufficient to address the impact of the pandemic. More than half of them thought that the catch-up would take five years or more. Since the start of the pandemic, each pupil has had an average of 115 days out of school. The north-east of England saw the highest rise in absence compared with anywhere else in the country in the last year, and I therefore consider that our area ought to benefit from the highest response in the form of countervailing measures to help us to catch up with more prosperous parts of the United Kingdom.

I believe that the Government should focus on three key issues to prevent further disruption. I will observe your strictures on brevity, Madam Deputy Speaker. Those issues are testing, classroom ventilation and vaccines.

Testing schoolchildren regularly is essential to ensure that the infected are isolated and pupils can carry on learning in person. I want to see the Government increase communication with parents to raise awareness of the latest testing guidance, and to work with schools by providing tests for pupils to take home and to promote uptake.

It is an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who gave an excellent speech outlining the scale of the problem we are looking to solve.

In my two years and one month as the Member of Parliament for Bolsover, we have had many divisions and many changes to our country. However, what was hardest to support, and which I probably regret the most, was closing schools to the majority of pupils. Bolsover, as the “Levelling Up” White Paper outlined, is already behind the rest of Derbyshire and the east midlands. In hindsight, it is difficult to support what we did to schools and I think I speak for many hon. Members on that front.

The challenge for our schools, teachers and families, of finding a way through to catching up, is incredibly difficult. I echo my right hon. Friend’s comments and thank all the teachers and headteachers who, over the past couple of years, have continued to go above and beyond. The scale of the challenge that headteachers face is as big now as it was then, because they continue to lose staff to omicron and so on. It is a constantly shifting jigsaw. We should not lose sight of the fact that they are trying to build a recovery on quicksand, because the situation is shifting so much at the moment.

One very positive development worth noting is that we are again talking about mental health. There has been a total transformation in society over the last 10 years or so in how open we are in discussing mental health. That is a massively positive thing. In recent weeks and months, I visited a number of my schools. The issues fed back to me on attainment, behaviour and mental health were notable. It is amazing how many of my primary schools said that when children, particularly the youngest, returned, they were unable to share space, toys and resources. That is a massive challenge because of covid. More than one headteacher has used the word “feral” to describe behaviour. Pupils returned in a state which meant they really had to be managed in a completely different way and on a scale that schools have not had to do before.

Quite simply, this debate could not be any more important. The inaction of the Government in catching up the lost learning of our young people will be felt by many of them for a lifetime. Why is it that our children, teachers and schools have been treated as an afterthought at every stage of the pandemic? We have seen the Government: closing schools without a second thought for those pupils who could not log in or learn from home; opening schools back up for less than 24 hours to encourage the virus to run rife; and leaving every announcement until past even the 11th hour—whether it be on exams, on testing, on vaccines.

When it comes to education, the contrast could not be starker. This Government think that they can cut corners on the months of lost learning, but, for Labour, education is so important that we say it three times. The catch-up programme does not even come close to meeting “the scale of the challenge.” Those are not my words, but the words of the Government’s own education recovery tsar whose resignation in June is all the evidence that anyone needs when considering whether the scale of the challenge is really understood. Sir Kevan’s essential proposals were watered down to the tune of less than 10% of the funding that he insisted was required. Why does the Minister think that this issue can be just brushed under the carpet?

While the Chancellor blocks the catch-up funding with one hand, he waves away wasted billions with another: £8.7 billion lost on PPE; £4.3 billion handed out to fraudsters; and a bonus £200 million thrown at the plans to downgrade St Helier Hospital to healthy, wealthy Belmont rather than keeping services where health is poorest.

We are eight months on since Sir Kevan’s damning indictment of the so-called catch-up plan. I take no satisfaction in saying that every word of his damning predictions has come true. It is a catch-up programme that is so inept that the national tutoring programme is even teaching to empty classrooms. An assistant headteacher at a school in Derby shockingly reports that her school was paying a tutor to sit with no pupils for an hour. It is scandalous. How is this possibly a good use of public funds, and how on earth does it help our young children to catch up? The failings are there for all to see. Only one in five headteachers in the north-east of England uses the programme. Many schools have found it impossible to enrol new children onto it, and the scheme is reaching less than 10% of its target pupil number. It is no wonder that tuition providers themselves have described it as shambolic.

There is no doubt that lockdown has had a major impact on children’s wellbeing, but it has given us an appreciation of the amazing work that teachers do. Once again, I want to pay tribute to every headteacher, teacher and support staff member in Meon Valley. I have been really impressed by the way they have coped in very difficult times. I am also very grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), the Chair of the Education Committee, for securing this debate, as it brings forward many thoughts about how we can best help our children and young people in schools and colleges.

The pandemic has been hugely disruptive to education and there is no doubt that pupils’ mental health issues have increased, especially in secondary schools. I suggest that even before the pandemic mental health and children’s happiness was already becoming an issue. “The Good Childhood Report”, published in August 2020 by The Children’s Society, which looked at the happiness and mental health of 15-year-olds, had observed a notable increase in the proportion of children with low wellbeing—18% had low wellbeing, compared with figures of 11% to 13% in previous years. England ranked 36th out of 45 countries in Europe and North America for young people’s life satisfaction. We had the largest reduction in life satisfaction between 2015 and 2018 out of all participating countries. That is really not acceptable.

The “State of the nation 2020: children and young people’s wellbeing” report points out:

“Children’s wellbeing and their mental health can have a real impact on their development into their full potential both now and as a tool in their futures.”

The report shows a sustained dip in happiness with school and there is strong evidence that fear of failure in 15-year-olds is intrinsically linked to education. I reported about this in my “One Nation” paper on education, as there was evidence that our education and assessment system is no longer fit for purpose and is not preparing our young people adequately for a life of work. We have now heard from The Times Education Commission and the independent assessment report from the National Education Union, which provide more insight into what we can do to improve our curriculum. I think that will improve young people’s views on school and their mental health, and I will come back to that in a moment.

I echo my hon. Friend’s thanks to teachers. Does she agree that having mental health first aid training across the community, as I am doing in Watford, where we are training 1,000 people in mental health first aid awareness, would help with this and would support teachers, parents, organisations and especially students as they move forward?