Young people's mental health crisis: Government caught navel-gazing again
The timing, serendipitous though it is, could not be more striking as a House of Lords scrutiny committee report into declining rosters at primary schools is published today, just hours after NHS doctors warned of a sharp rise in children attending accident and emergency hospital departments requiring treatment for mental health ailments.
The Government is failing to support those primary schools that face falling enrolment, as they suffer a decrease in funding coupled with a lack of strategic support to manage the issues caused by declining rolls, claims the House of Lords Public Services Committee.
In its recommendations, sent to the Minister of State for Education, Georgia Gould, the committee says school closures and mergers should be avoided where possible. Chief among the reasons for that particular recommendation is to help protect the mental wellbeing of children who are at a critical stage on their learning journeys and at a particularly vulnerable stage in their fledgling lives.
Chaired by Lord Bradley, the letter sent offered a withering assessment of ministerial foresight, quite rightly underscoring that birthrates have been falling in this country for some time and so therefore, to cite the letter, the Government should have seen this coming. That it hasn’t is symptomatic of a Whitehall elite that is all too often caught navel-gazing, contemplating the comings and goings of Westminster first and foremost, ahead, on this occasion, of the needs of a generation of young people caught in the throes of a mental health crisis. Grasp this nettle, now, for it will not take long to take a foothold in secondary schools, too.