Peter Jenkins introduces a timely and important new report on therapy in UK schools.
We now live in an age of therapy, where therapy is routinely offered to troubled detectives on Netflix, and praised for helping change minds on BBC IPlayer. Therapy has finally arrived, after a bumpy start, and is self-evidently A Good Thing. It seems to be even more of A Good Thing for Children. Since the last election, all major political parties in the UK support the introduction of funding for mental health support for children in schools. The need for psychological support for children is apparently endless. Almost 20% of school-aged children in the UK have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, up from 10% twenty years ago. What used to be rare and stigmatised labels, ranging from ADHD to autism, now jostle for our attention and for specialist funding, adroitly promoted by TikTok influencers and by partisan lobby groups.
But is more therapy for children the right answer? And if it is the right answer, what is the problem that therapy is meant to be solving? Lucy Beney tackles this issue head-on, in a recent, very timely publication for the Family Education Trust. Lucy is a qualified counsellor, and currently Children’s Correspondent for campaign group Save Mental Health. She has worked in a variety of different settings, including her own private practice. For five years, she was a counsellor in a large academy school. But more than this, Lucy absolutely knows the real world of counselling children inside out. For example, she knows that much school-based counselling is actually provided on the quiet by unqualified student counsellors, as part of a highly questionable business model used by some of the major providers on the scene.
Competing initiatives crowd each other out via turf wars to establish a foothold in the rewarding market of school-based counselling. So we now have Education Mental Health Practitioners, Emotional Literacy Support Assistants, Parent Family Support Advisers, Mental Health First Aiders and Psychological First Aiders, as well as School Counsellors, all jostling for position and influence. At the same time there has been an explosion in the use of diagnostic categories, ranging from ADHD to neurodiversity. The former category of SEN (Special Educational Needs) has been radically expanded to include Disability, hence SEND. From this year, all schools will have a designated ‘Senior Mental Health Lead’ in place.
But surely all this overlapping provision is well intended and therefore serving a useful purpose? Lucy Beney is not convinced and uses the research to show that the goals of school mental health interventions are often unclear and poorly researched. For example, should interventions be pitched at a whole school level, to make students more aware of problematic emotional issues, or should they be reserved for individual interventions, or perhaps include both? Does introducing mindfulness, for instance, play a useful role in schools, or does it foster a culture where students ruminate on their negative feelings, but without building resilience and coping strategies?
Lucy Beney takes a sceptical insider’s approach towards the way in which a mental health ideology, based on identifiable sectional interests, has effectively colonised educational theory, practice and resources, without resting on firm evidence of positive outcomes. The analogy with gender identity ideology, now deeply embedded within school mental health services in its unchallengeable support for social transition of gender questioning children, is made all-too-clearly apparent here. Her conclusion is that we are starting from the wrong end by trying to therapise children in school for social problems which have their origins in a much deeper malaise within society. Hence, she argues “we have a very large, complex and growing problem on our hands, and very little idea of how to solve it…We need to take a clear-eyed look at where we are going wrong, and not focus on what is allegedly ‘wrong’ with our children.”
Anyone concerned about the wellbeing of our children should read this timely and passionate analysis.
Beney, L. (2025) Suffer the children: Why having a ‘mental health professional’ in every school is not the answer. Family Education Trust. https://www.familyeducationtrust.org.uk/research/suffer-the-children-why-having-a-mental-health-professional-in-every-school-is-not-the-answer
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