16 May 2025, 12:40 | Updated: 16 May 2025, 20:10

By Natasha Devon MBE

The year is 2015. Britain has endured five years of conservative-led austerity, meaning many communities lost their social services, free sports facilities and libraries.

Michael Gove has made swingeing changes to the education system resulting in more testing and a relentless focus on so-called ‘core academic’ subjects at the expense of arts, sports and music.

At the same time, the technological revolution has meant more children than ever have a smart phone and are accessing pornography and other inappropriate material via social media.

All of this is having precisely the impact you would expect on young people’s mental health. The absence of activities with a proven therapeutic value (sports and arts), combined with an ‘exam factory’ schooling environment, stressed-out teachers trying to cope with the sudden introduction of acres more paperwork, stressed-out parents working longer hours to make ends meet and a life increasingly lived online is leading to spiralling rates of mental health issues.

Three children in every classroom have a diagnosed mental illness, according to charity Young Minds. One in 10 will develop an eating disorder before their 25th birthday, according to research from charity Beat.

Hospitalisations from self-harm and eating disorders doubled between 2013 and 2016.

So it was galling, given all this context, when then-Education Secretary Nicky Morgan gave interviews to the newspapers about young........

© LBC