The forthcoming review of relationships and sex education (RSE) and health education will consider whether to add a specific requirement on teaching about suicide prevention, schools minister Nick Gibb has said.
MPs from across the political spectrum backed a call to make the subject compulsory in schools during a parliamentary debate on Monday.
Andy Airey, Mike Palmer and Tim Owen - who formed the Three Dads Walking campaign group following the deaths of their three daughters - secured the parliamentary debate by filing a petition signed by nearly 160,000 people.
Opening the debate in Westminster Hall, Nick Fletcher, Conservative MP for Don Valley, said the education secretary had promised in a letter last week that the issue would be a “key priority area” in the forthcoming review of RSE and health education.
Duncan Baker, the Conservative MP for North Norfolk, told the debate that research by charity Young Minds had found that suicides among young people aged 15 to 19 rose by one-third between 2020 and 2021 - from 147 to 198.
The review was originally due to begin in September, but last week prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that it would start “as soon as possible”.
Teaching about suicide prevention
Mr Gibb told the debate that the current content of the curriculum on mental health and wellbeing covers a large amount of what is important in suicide prevention, “but we will look further at this as a priority area for the review and decide whether to add requirements on teaching about suicide”.
“As part of taking a comprehensive, evidence-based approach, we will make sure we speak to the experts in the field,” Mr Gibb said.
He added that ensuring that pupils understand the links between good physical and mental health will provide them with valuable tools for managing their emotions.
He said: “We want schools to develop curriculum content that is helpful to their pupils. Our approach is not to dictate how and when schools teach this content, but to ensure that they recognise that it must be covered in an age-appropriate and sensitive way.”
Mr Gibb said the RSE and health education statutory guidance is clear that the subject of suicide and self-harm can be discussed as part of this topic, “but it is important that teachers approach it carefully, because we have to acknowledge that, taught badly, it has the potential to do harm”.
“We need to consider the issues carefully before making it an absolute requirement,” he added.
He said that the government was funding a large-scale randomised controlled trial of approaches to improving pupil mental wellbeing in schools.
One arm of the trial is testing approaches to mental health awareness teaching, including a school-based programme for young people aged 13 to 17 called Youth Aware of Mental Health, “for which there is good international evidence that it reduces suicidal ideation”, said Mr Gibb.
He said the scheme had the potential to add to existing work to improve teacher confidence and the quality of teaching by developing online training materials and implementation guides that give advice to schools and staff on how best to support pupils’ mental and physical health.
The issue of social media and the dark web came up during the debate, with one MP referring to the “toxicity of TikTok”.
Mr Gibb said that his department had published guidance for schools on teaching online safety, to help them deliver internet safety content “in a coordinated and coherent way across their curriculum”.
To check that RSE and health education teaching is having an effect, we are “monitoring its implementation”, he added, saying: “We want to test whether schools are implementing the requirements with sufficient quality to understand what helps and hinders good teaching.”
