With depression and anxiety affecting more and more of our young people, it’s high-time that the root causes and the provision of support are tackled head-on by our government.
This is the call of MummyPages UK’s parenting community, who are urging the British Government to place social workers in all schools, in an effort to provide the best support possible for our children.
Those resources provided by local authorities are now so stretched, that schools are unable to keep up with the ever-increasing number of students being diagnosed with depression and anxiety. In the absence of specialised experts, existing staff members are having to step in and help students who are experiencing problems - the result: more and more, the emergency services are being called to take over.
Now, the MummyPages community is calling on the government to tackle this issue by urging schools to hire on-site social workers.
The basic education structure is already in place for students, under the Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PHSE) Curriculum; a programme which teaches students about topics including health and wellbeing, relationships, and living in the wider world. What is needed now, however, to ensure that our young people are receiving the optimum care and education on these issues, is for dedicated professional social workers to teach the curriculum in schools.
Commenting on the urgent need for a renewed approach in this area, MummyPages UK spokesperson Amanda McKnight said: “The feedback we are getting from our mums at MummyPages is they want to see a more experienced and deliberate instruction of the issues affecting the mental health of their children.”
She added that a social worker should be on-site to deal with an entire range of issues including the support of special needs teachers, helping with language deficits and crisis response, and providing emotional support for our children.
“Parents feel it needs to be an ethos that the school lives by in caring for each others' well-being, introducing coping skills, learning to negotiate and take into account others' needs and opinions, mindfulness techniques, dealing with online and offline bullying and all the issues which start off small but can progress into serious mental health problems if left. They want their children to be emotionally safe,” she added.
