In 2013, I wrote an open letter to then-education secretary Michael Gove, which was subsequently published in the Daily Telegraph.

I had, at that point, been visiting schools for around five years. His leadership at the Department for Education had seen budgets for PSHE slashed and there was much talk and some evidence of sports, arts, music and drama being sacrificed in favour of “real academia”. In the letter, I wrote:

“I agree entirely that British children deserve the best possible education and should be encouraged towards the highest academic standards they are capable of. However, academic and emotional education are not mutually exclusive and they are not opposed to one another. They must, crucially, work in tandem if young people are to benefit from a truly excellent school experience.”

In 2016, after I had been hired as the government’s mental health champion (peculiar in light of the above) and swiftly axed nine months later, the Guardian claimed that I had predicted in my letter that Gove’s education policies would cause a mental health crisis in schools. I would love to agree with them, to proclaim myself a modern-day soothsayer, but I do not think I recognised at the time just how much impact Tory education reforms would have on the wellbeing of pupils and teachers alike. It has, in many respects, kept me in business. It’s a job I would happily surrender in favour of more effective management of the education system.

Last week, I presented evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee on schools and mental health. My panel also consisted of Lord Layard (one of the founding members of Action for Happiness), Dr Peter Hindley and Baroness Tyler of Enfield.

As we were quizzed about best practice in schools and what children and young people need to learn in order to be educated on basic mental health maintenance (the mental equivalents of healthy eating and exercise), I realised that there were two gigantic, unacknowledged elephants in the room.

All talk and no funding

The first elephant was funding. Last month we learned that 70 per cent of schools in the London area alone are to endure predicted cuts to their budgets. Worryingly, many of the schools which comprise this 70 per cent are struggling to make ends meet as it is. In England, schools will face a forecast £3 billion worth of cuts by 2020, around 8 per cent of their total budget. To put this into context, this is more than twice the amount the government has pledged to invest into mental health education and services for young people by the same year - a sum it seems to believe will have a significant impact.

When schools and colleges are facing financial difficulty, the first things they are forced to sacrifice are those which countless studies have shown us are beneficial to mental health. Some 75 per cent of colleges ran in at a loss last financial year and a large proportion of them had to cut their enrichment programmes - sports and arts - which have a measureable positive impact on wellbeing. Similarly, schools have, through a combination of lack of resources and the way their “success” is measured, had to make similar difficult decisions. In many cases, they’ve also had to cut their school counsellors and education psychologists.

It’s all very well discussing what best practice looks like in theory, but if there simply aren’t the funds or resources to put it into place, it’s unfair, not to mention unrealistic, to expect schools to emulate it.

The second elephant was more of a philosophical one. I wondered whether we might be focusing too much on teaching children in theory what will make them healthy and functional, instead of simply getting on with it. It’s a similar motif we have seen with physical health - nutritionists being recruited to visit primary schools and put the fear of God into five-year-olds about the dangers of refined sugar and obesity-induced type two diabetes, whilst the government simultaneously refused to tackle either the quality of school meals or the closing down of community-run sports clubs across the UK.

Don’t misunderstand - of course, I believe mental health literacy and emotional vocabulary are incredibly important. Yet they are only part of a solution which must also encompass the development of healthy habits through practising them regularly. After all, repetition is how humans learn.

In infancy and adolescence, we are developing patterns of behaviour and thought we will most likely go on to either repeat indefinitely or spend the remainder of our lives trying to undo. Regular physical activity, having a means of expressing yourself without language (art, music) and developing your ability to think creatively are all, therefore, crucial during this period. It seems ludicrous to be seemingly working towards a future where children are sat behind a desk learning why these things are, theoretically, important in favour of actually doing them.

Ultimately, this is about what we value as a society. The fact that developing creativity is far more likely to prepare young people for jobs which can’t be done by a robot in an increasingly technological future is a subject for another column. So, in fact, is the idea that we place personal responsibility for health on to individuals through media and rhetoric whilst allowing corporations to flood 80 per cent of the foods on our supermarket shelves with hidden excess refined sugar, and associate “hard work” with moral goodness. The crux is that, whilst of course heightened awareness has to some degree led to more children and teenagers reporting with mental health issues, so has the gradual stripping and undermining of those subjects not considered to be “core academic” since 2010.

A balance must be struck. Theoretical, age-appropriate mental health education is vital. So is teaching through doing and leading by example. There would not have been a meeting to gather evidence in Parliament if the issue was not being taken seriously. However, if we want to tackle it in the most effective way, change must be fundamental, rather than superficial. We must examine how the curriculum can support the wellbeing of teachers and pupils alike, instead of the current daily attack upon it. 

Natasha Devon is founder of the Body Gossip Education Programme and the Self-Esteem Team and former UK government mental health champion for schools. She tweets as @_NatashaDevon

For more columns by Natasha, visit her back catalogue of articles

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