Schools have had to become the “fourth emergency service” as the erosion of support services means the sector has been “left to pick up the pieces”, a school leader is expected to say today.
Speaking at the union’s annual conference today, Evelyn Forde, president of the Association of School and College Leaders, is expected to warn that schools are having to run an “unofficial network of welfare support” for pupils.
Her comments come as ASCL today publishes the results of a survey of leaders in England, Wales and Northern Ireland carried out last month.
It found that almost all respondents (99 per cent) said that children’s mental health services were inadequate, while 96 per cent said children’s social care services were inadequate.
Ms Forde will say: “Support services have been eroded over the last decade by government austerity, by increasing demand, or by a mixture of both. They simply do not have sufficient resources to be able to cope.
“That has had a profound impact on the wellbeing of children and it has left us - in our schools and colleges - to pick up the pieces. We’ve become a ‘fourth emergency service’.”
Ms Forde is also expected to say that the sector “simply cannot function” without “sufficient numbers of teachers” but this is “where we find ourselves”.
The latest teacher trainee recruitment data for this year was described as “catastrophic” by heads’ leaders, with government data revealing the Department for Education missed its target for secondary teacher trainee entrants by a wider margin of 41 per cent.
The ASCL survey of 1,120 headteachers and principals in state-funded schools and colleges in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, carried out in February of this year, also revealed that the majority of respondents (93 per cent) felt local authority educational psychology services were inadequate, while 81 per cent said local authority attendance support services were inadequate.
Several respondents also highlighted a lack of sufficient support at local authority level for children with special educational needs, and the insufficiency of high-quality alternative provision in their local area.
Respondents called for the improvement of additional mental health and counselling support, employing more pastoral and attendance support staff, employing their own educational psychologists, and also providing support such as food banks and uniforms for children living in poverty.
Several said that their leadership and staffing teams had seen their workloads increase in response to these pressures, and that the extra provision they were providing was unsustainable in terms of their budgets.
The survey also suggested that more pupils are affected by a range of social factors than before the Covid pandemic and the recent cost-of-living crisis, with almost all respondents (99 per cent) claiming more students were affected by poor mental health.
Last month, leaders warned that schools are being left to deal with a “tsunami of pressures” hitting pupils’ wellbeing.
