Can you teach children “grit”? Ministers want to ensure that mental resilience is taught in schools to counter what they describe as a “doom loop” of poor mental health which drives record school absences and higher health spending longer into the future.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson plan to merge attendance and behaviour hubs in schools as part of a drive to “tackle anxiety and low mood” in the classroom. The pair say their “evidence-based intervention” will “not only halt the spiral towards crisis but cultivate much-needed grit amongst the next generation, essential for academic success and life beyond school, with all its ups and downs”.
On one level, trying to teach children resilience makes a lot of sense: life is difficult and there is a popular societal trend towards pathologising the troubles we all encounter such as grief, or suggesting that mental health problems automatically mean you cannot live a full life.
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Mental health is, according to the Department for Education’s own figures, one of the major drivers of school absences: children who are classed as “severely absent”, meaning they miss more than half of their schooling, have mental health that is twice as bad as those who miss only one per cent of class time.
But as with the recent trend in education for teaching a “growth mindset”, teaching resilience could end up being something that makes little sense to children – especially if their teachers have little idea what they’re talking about either.
The “growth mindset” theory should involve encouraging children to think that if, for instance, they find maths difficult, that they can still do it if they practice and identify what’s holding them back, rather than just saying “I’m bad at maths”. Many parents, though, know that in practice this can end up being a harried teacher telling baffled children that they need a “positive growth mindset” without really having the time to demonstrate how that might work.
And while it is essential to do everything possible to prevent mental health problems from developing in the first place, even a strong layer of “grit” won’t stop some children from falling ill.
When that happens, what they need is not a mindset but a mental health system that responds quickly. The child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) does not do that. Children are frequently left waiting for months or years for a diagnosis, let alone treatment, and are sent back to their GPs after referrals to specialist services simply because there is no capacity in the system. Average waits are around 100 days, but thousands of children wait more than two years.
This is not a resilient system by any stretch of the imagination. Children do not get better when on waiting lists: their illnesses become more complex and sometimes less treatable. Of course, some of them may avoid going into the waiting line at all if they are more resilient, but it’s nigh-on impossible to teach someone to have more grit once they are ill.
It is also much harder to teach children resilience when society as a whole is so unhealthy. I don’t just mean some of the unhelpful messaging about mental illness being a destination rather than something that can be treatable or managed. It’s also that we have a mentally unhealthy world, and seem intent on making that worse.
Our children have, on average, less outdoor time than a prisoner, and this is not a tribute to the luxurious conditions enjoyed by jailbirds. There is a strong link between mental health and exercise, especially in the outdoors, and yet we continue to design our lives in a way that makes it easier to be inactive, and shuts the increasingly scary and alien natural world out.
Parents complain when their children come home from school or nursery plastered in mud, rather than realising that this is an essential and healthy part of their development (and soil contains a bacteria, Mycobacterium vaccae, which increases serotonin release and improves mood). Around three quarters of children aged 11-17 are inactive, even though we know that physical exercise improves mood. And while phones themselves might not be unhealthy, social media can be desperately damaging to children’s sense of self and also their ability to switch off.
So yes, perhaps some lessons in grit might be handy for children: schools shouldn’t just be drilling knowledge into kids, but also encouraging them to be healthy, rounded characters. But it’s going to be much harder to grow resilient children when the world around them almost seems designed to produce exactly the opposite.
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