Every morning you see them now, walking, riding, or waiting for the bus – the next generation of our children are back at school. Some like Shakespeare’s “creeping like a snail unwillingly”, others horsing happily about, many on their phones.
The sight of jolly schoolkids lifts the spirits, just as an unhappy face or a lonely figure makes you quail inside. But the ones we really worry about are the ones we do not see. Although many are a-bounce with the joys of the start of a new term and seeing all their friends, a truly alarming number of children are refusing school altogether.
Earlier this year, a survey found that almost three in 10 secondary pupils are avoiding going to school because doing so would make them anxious, missing 10 per cent of school. It’s a doubling, post-pandemic, reflected in the same increase, to 17 per cent of pupils in primaries.
More than 93,000 pupils lose more than half of their education through absence. They face their days dark with resistance or fraught with misery. They plead, yell or vanish. They refuse to go. A report last month showed that 500 children a day in England are being referred to NHS mental health services for anxiety, more than double the rate before the pandemic began. To put this into perspective, this means one child every three minutes is being referred to mental health services in England, almost 4,000 a week.
And that is when they can get access to those services. NHS figures show that 28 per cent were still waiting for support from mental services months after trying to access it, while 39 per cent had their referral closed before accessing support.
Over 1.6 million school days begin with disputes and stand-offs, with beseeching, insisting and rowing, and all for nothing. In many cases, children’s life chances start to die right there.
Our children’s wellbeing elucidates serious problems with how we live and what we teach. While the reasons for the current distress of our young are wide and varied, there are core themes experts keep pointing to that include intensifying academic pressures and stresses related to the influence of social media and the cost of living crisis.
Our children require immediate action in how we understand and educate them. We know that teaching towards testing, rather than for the sake of fascination and discovery, has taken the life and vim out of classes and schools. Even worse, this is delivering poorer educational results.
In effective systems, like Finland’s, mothers are better supported by the state and are given a choice between work and early years childcare. Finns also have the world’s happiest and least-stressed children because they are assessed by teachers over a number of years, rather than drilled towards our hopelessly limited SATs at the end of year 6 when physical and mental development can still vary hugely.
“Reforms” to the national curriculum and ideological meddling by successive secretaries of state for education (there have been five in the last two years) have forced teachers to fill children like buckets with facts to be tested. The solution to falling standards in recent years has been to add more work but this has simply increased anxiety and stress for everyone.
Increasingly unmanageable levels of admin and box ticking have beaten freedom and joy out of teaching. Hardly surprising, then, that a quarter of all teachers quit within the first three years of qualifying, a third after five. The pressure is pushing children and their parents and teachers to breaking point. Interestingly, California has just passed the Healthy Homework Act which we would do well to copy here.
Aimed at reducing homework and cutting ill-designed assignments and excessive testing, the law is a reaction to 52 per cent of Californian parents and children reporting that much of the homework being set was doing more harm than good. It increases anxiety which throttles learning and, in many cases, it simply backfires. These American parents have had enough.
Anxiety is a ghastly condition. There is no inherent reason for it to be widespread among our young but the foundations of good mental health have been internationally established by researchers at the University of Nottingham, summarised in the Chime framework. It stands for Connection, Hope, Identity, Meaning and Empowerment.
Worryingly, so many of these core pillars for good mental health are becoming increasingly fragile for our young.
Too much of a focus on communications technology has damaged their connection with each other, overloading them with distractions and social media, pushing them down algorithm-led wormholes; introducing them to pornography and violence while their brains are still developing.
If comparison is the thief of joy, the key years to establishing an adult personality are now being spent in environments of performative one-upmanship where self-worth is driven by likes and other spurious forms of affirmation. The result is a generation of children growing up insecure about their looks and spending their most vulnerable years in a world where cyberbullying is rife.
Schools in France, Hungary, Holland and parts of Belgium have banned smartphones. Many British private schools already confiscate them for the duration of the school day. Smartphone-free schools should be national policy for the state sector and the change should happen now. The evidence from Dutch children and teachers is unambiguous, yet Britain could still take years to make a simple improvement that could be enacted tomorrow.
Defeating anxiety means giving children hope. Our post-Victorian education system, designed to turn out factory workers, labourers and administrators, robs many children of hope before they finish school.
Our creative industry is one of Britain’s global strengths. But decades of hostility towards the arts, music and drama in schools and beyond means funding has been cut and provision for creativity which can bring so much joy – as well as money to the economy – is on life support.
