Bethan Jenkins gave us a very powerful example of somebody having to deal with mental health issues on a day-to-day basis, without any of the training that you would normally expect. My daughter, as a primary school teacher, often tells me about very painful circumstances that she describes of children in her care, which is a daily experience for any primary school teacher, unfortunately, in areas of deprivation. They really do bring tears to your eyes, because those children rely on the school to be their place of safety. I wanted to talk about the importance of the school in helping to resolve some of the issues that children encounter, which if not resolved in school, do end up as pretty substantive mental health problems in adulthood.

We know from the Welsh Government’s figures that last year self-harm among young people has reached a five-year high, with more than 1,500 young people between 10 and 19 treated in Welsh hospitals for harming themselves. We also know that children are using self-harm as a way of trying to deal with very difficult emotional states. Often, children will misinterpret events that adults would regard as trivial and unimportant, but, without having the ability to discuss them properly with an adult, will become major issues in the child’s mind. I want to highlight the fact that the Public Policy Institute for Wales report that was published in February focused on the fact that pupils supported by the pupil deprivation grant are at greater risk of mental health problems than other pupils.

Yesterday, the Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Children spoke about the focus on adverse childhood experiences, and the need to reduce them if we’re not going to have more and more of the same inter-generational problems reoccurring, with people ending up in unemployment, in mental health hospitals, in prison. I absolutely agree with that. So, I think that there’s much that can be done in schools, and I think we have to prevent these adverse childhood experiences of mainly verbal abuse and parental separation being passed down from one generation to the next.