There was a good letter from Dr Lucy Johnstone in the Guardian earlier this week about the supposed mental health crisis among schoolchildren.
She wrote:
The "staggering" rise in anxiety among children (NHS referrals for anxiety in children more than double pre-Covid levels, 27 August) deserves a more sophisticated response than installing counsellors in every school, useful though that may be in some cases, and I say this as a mental health professional - a consultant clinical psychologist.
Well-meaning awareness campaigns that encourage us to translate every feeling into a "mental health issue" convey the message that children have an individual deficit, while obscuring the reasons for their distress. And yet research consistently shows that their feelings are understandable in context.
Your article mentions pressures from target-driven education, online bullying, poverty and uncertainty about the future. None of this will be resolved by funding extra mental health professionals, helplines and support hubs. Indeed, that is likely to perpetuate the cycle, since these are not fundamentally medical problems – they are social ones.
This is a point that I hope my fellow Liberal Democrats will bear in mind, as the call for a mental health professional in every school was in our general election manifesto.
There's is currently a vogue for imposing zero-tolerance behaviour policies on pupils in state schools, particularly in areas where many of them are working class or from ethnic minorities.
Meanwhile, free from the ministrations of Ofsted, private schools now, as I once put it:
trade ("children can get muddy") on their freedom from the straitjacket imposed by the Gradgrinds at the Department for Education.
Will the new Labour government makes things better?
The signs are not promising. Pam Jarvis has pointed out on Bluesky that the DfE's new behaviour and attendance external reference group includes a police officer but not a psychologist.
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