Teachers fill void left by youth cuts, MPs warn

Lisa Nandy, the shadow minister for children and Sharon Hodgson, shadow education minister, said teachers are facing increasing pressure to help pupils with a raft of issues, from housing problems to family finances.

Speaking at a youth select committee inquiry into education, the national curriculum and life skills, Nandy said: “We are concerned that support is disappearing outside the classroom. Young people who might have gone to a youth service provision before do not have access to this now.

“I shadowed a teacher in north London recently and was really surprised to find they were dealing with things like sending pest control to a child’s home paid for through the school budget because they had mice in the house and the child didn’t want to go home and was upset in school. The impact of benefit changes was another issue and they were dealing with children who were coming to school too hungry to learn. They were too tired to cope.”

Nandy and Hodgson said making personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education a statutory subject on the national curriculum, offering pupils a regular session to get advice on issues such as family finances and sex and relationships, would help ease pressure on teachers.

A Labour amendment to the Children and Families Bill calling for PHSE to become a statutory subject was rejected in the House of Commons last month. Labour’s frontbenchers are hoping that the House of Lords will support the move later this year.

An Ofsted report called Not Yet Good Enough and based on evidence gathered in 2012, found PSHE lessons in four out of ten schools were either inadequate or required improvement.

Nandy says PSHE’s status as a compulsory subject is vital to ensuring schools are committed to specialist training for teachers in PHSE subjects, particularly around sex and relationships advice.

She said: “We are concerned that young people are not getting the life skills to keep them safe. The power to protect themselves from exploitation is very important, as you know from recent court cases, such as in Oxford. This is a real problem facing young boys and girls.

“It's important that boys and girls know what the boundaries are. We want to put a real emphasis on relationships. There’s a real gap in that in education at the moment.”

Hodgson also used the session to outline some of the subjects she would like to see included in PSHE lessons. This included child and brain development to help young people understand how they have developed and prepare them for parenthood in later life.