Mental health among children is in crisis. Samantha Laurie on how charity Place2Be is stemming the tide
Knightsbridge School in Kensington and Chelsea is a small, private £18,000 a year prep school whose children learn Latin and French alongside Brazilian jiu-jitsu and go on to the city’s most prestigious day schools, such as Dulwich College and St Paul’s.
It’s not the most obvious host school for a project that has made its home in some of Britain’s most deprived communities. Place2Be is a national charity that supports troubled, anxious, unhappy children aged 4-14 through a mix of group and individual play-based counselling sessions. Staffed by volunteer counsellors, it offers a quiet space in schools where children can come to talk or play.
Set up in the 1990s, it grew out of a recognition that there are many children – some disruptive and angry, others introverted and anxious – who need a place to talk about the things that worry them: home, relationships, family illness, depression, death.
“Our traditional areas are places where it’s tough to be a child and tough to be a parent, but all children struggle at some point in their lives,” says Stephen Adams-Langley, the charity’s Senior Clinical Consultant.
“Children can’t learn properly if they’re anxious. Bitter and acrimonious family breakdowns, social media pressures, domestic violence, parents with depression – all these can be devastating for children.
“We need somewhere in every school where children can voice their worries.”
It’s a message increasingly heeded by schools like Knightsbridge, Dulwich Prep London, Francis Holland School in Sloane Square and 250 other primary and secondary schools around the country.
All of them regard £35,000 a year spent on the services of Place2Be as a priority, in the absence of adequate help beyond the school gates.
Few heads can be unaware of the scale of the crisis unfolding in children’s mental health: emergency admissions for psychiatric conditions have doubled in four years; Childline reports a 41% rise in self-harming and 33% increase in children having suicidal thoughts; Public Health England concludes that one third of English adolescents have sub-clinical mental health problems.
A generation bedroomed by technology and scorched by the heat of academic competition has become less resilient to life’s ups and downs. Social media, bullying and the pressure to be slim and perfect have combined to form a toxic brew and home offers no protection from the constant trade in the social marketplace.
Inevitably, small problems become big problems if they are not nipped in the bud. Three quarters of all mental illness begins in childhood, yet only 6% of the national mental health budget is spent on minors.
Earlier this year, however, the Coalition allocated an extra £1.25 billion to mental health spending; and, as a blueprint for the kind of preventative mental health scheme in schools that this extra money could fund, Place2Be certainly presents well. An impressive 70% of children who attend its sessions are less disruptive subsequently in the classroom; 65% improve academically.
As the head of one of Place2Be’s newly recruited schools, Lucy Elphinstone of Francis Holland School Sloane Square, sums up on the school’s website:
“For it is clear to me that simply teaching children to pass exams is not only inadequate, it is dishonest. Academic cleverness alone will not provide the springboard for success in this competitive and evolving world…but we must also develop in our children skills of creativity, flexibility, lateral thinking and enterprise; we must foster intuition and resilience; we must nurture empathy and courage.”
We must, in summary, give them the right tools for robust mental health.
You can find out more on the Place2Be website
