If you’ve been utterly enthralled by the Conservative leadership race, which is now a death match between killer clown Boris Johnson and the master of failing upwards Jeremy Hunt, you might have missed the fact that the Tories are putting “prevention at the top of the #MentalHealth agenda”, as they put it on their official Twitter account.
All new teachers will receive mental health training, backed up by updated statutory guidance to make clear schools’ responsibilities to protect children’s mental wellbeing. Health education, with special emphasis on mental health, will be compulsory from 2020. At this point, do you think this all sounds totally reasonable?
Let’s keep it real. I spent a decade working in education. For nine of those years, I did my job under the growing duress of Conservative-led policy. I taught at both secondary and primary level, with some of our most vulnerable, marginalised children, in one of the poorest wards in Britain. I taught in my own community in North London, where half our children live below the poverty line and we are surviving on the brutal, cutting edge of austerity. Tory policy had the dual effect of making the lives of the children I taught harder, while making it ever more difficult to do my job.
While mental illness can affect anyone, nobody can deny the link between socio-economic circumstance and psychological wellbeing. Our families, struggling to keep afloat in this blue storm of benefit cuts, debt, hostile immigration policy and insecure housing, are truly suffering. And children feel that suffering most acutely. Teachers know this. They’ve been knowing this.
In 2012, the chief medical officer reported that children from the poorest households were three times more likely to suffer from mental illness than children in wealthier homes. This time last year, a TUC study concluded that a million more children were living in poverty than in 2010, when David Cameron (propped up by that jellyfish Clegg) whistled his way into government. It’s impossible to believe those distressing figures have suddenly, drastically reversed in the last year, given the fact that Theresa May’s shambolic Brexit dealings have fixated parliament.
Children who are suffering come to school in need of a safe space and respite from the insecure existence which is damaging their mental health. Teachers and support staff do their upmost to look after children’s psychological wellbeing, often going above and beyond in order to do so. I’ve shuttled children to and from the boxing gym where I coach in the evenings, subsidising their sessions with my own money. I’ve advocated for families, overwhelmed by the bureaucratic nonsense that means they can’t access support they so desperately need because of their immigration status. I’ve given parents directions to the local food bank. I’ve spent hours comforting a child after a parent’s suicide.
The idea of school being a safe space has been steadily dismantled by lack of funding. What this looks like is a lack of basic equipment, increased class sizes and redundancies. It means telling a classroom full of working class children to wear their coats inside because the heating ain’t being turned on until November. I know of one school in my borough that finishes at 2.30 in the afternoon every day, meaning teachers and children get one half-hour break from learning. Consider the knock-on effect that early finish has on working parents, or children with insecure home lives, from which coming to school is a temporary relief.
And guess what? The most vulnerable are disproportionately affected by this mess, with pastoral care and support staff being decimated. It is often these education professionals who do the most to safeguard vulnerable children’s mental health. At a time when the human cost of austerity means pastoral care takes on extra significance, schools are dispensing with those who provide it in order to redirect meagre resources elsewhere.
When teachers do identify children who are suffering with poor mental health, and take steps to refer them to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), they are entering them into a collapsing, underfunded system. In 2017, a third of children’s mental health services faced either downsizing or closure. What that means is intolerable waits and denial of care at a time when early intervention can mean prevention.
Working against this most fucked up of backdrops takes a huge toll on teachers’ mental health too. The Teacher Wellbeing Index, carried out in 2018, found that 31% of education professionals experienced a mental health issue that year. And 76% experienced behavioural, psychological or physical symptoms due to their work.
While I loved my job and the children I supported, it drained me emotionally and physically. Ten years of absorbing the trauma of others, amidst a system seemingly designed to exacerbate their pain, certainly contributed to the depressive episode I suffered last July, from which the ultimate fallout led to me resigning from my post. I’ve since being diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and have been waiting months for treatment. I’m furious about this, and I know exactly where to direct my anger. It’s certainly not at the NHS, steadily being bled dry in preparation for privatisation.
The Tory pledge to put “prevention at the top of the #MentalHealth agenda” is a dangerous joke. It is the equivalent of putting a Winnie the Pooh plaster, the type of which our school nurse kept in her cupboard before her hours were reduced and teaching assistants were asked to cover medical duties, over a shotgun blast. What it really means is, ‘you lot do as much as you can to prevent children suffering from poor mental health, while we invest as little money in the services you all need as possible, because Brexit means Brexit.’
It is the state’s responsibility to protect our collective mental wellbeing. And the state is not fit for purpose.