New government, same blame game: why ‘grit’ won’t fix Britain’s youth mental health crisis, writes Natasha Devon

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 people’s lack of ‘grit’.

‘Resilience’ was the word of the moment in the Department for Education, where I was at the time trying to work with ministers and ‘experts’ who believed that ‘peer support’ was going to compensate for a lack of professional services and said things like ‘what if we created an app where children get a badge that says ‘I’m a good friend’?’ (Anyone familiar with this story will know I was fired as the government’s first ever mental health tsar nine months later for being too outspoken about increasing child poverty rates – poverty being the most significant vulnerability factor in all adverse health outcomes whether physical or mental - and the impact of education reforms).

Fast forward to 2025. The shared trauma of the pandemic and lockdowns has exacerbated an already dire mental health crisis. 1.5 million children are persistently out of school, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Meanwhile, 620,000 young people were out of work during the last quarter (partly, of course, because of a lack of job vacancies, but mental health issues are an important part of the picture).

Previous Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Mel Stride has intervened, suggesting (with no peer-reviewed supporting evidence whatsoever) that mental health issues are being ‘overprescribed’ and that people unable to work as a result of mental illness are ‘driving up the benefits bill’. Unsurprisingly, attitudes towards mental health have regressed to 2009 levels, as reported by charity MIND.

The tireless campaigning of numerous organisations and individuals trying to eradicate stigma, to make people realise that mental health problems are just as real as physical ones and deserve parity of esteem is being rapidly unravelled.

But never mind all that because in July 2024 we got a shiny, brand-new government! People were stick to the back teeth of the conservatives punching down on society’s most vulnerable and oversimplifying complex social problems with meaningless soundbites.

They told them so in no uncertain terms at the ballot box and gave Labour a landslide victory in the process. ‘Everything will be different now’ we thought.

How naïve we were. Starmer’s Labour have since taken away winter fuel payments for pensioners, pledged to further restrict personal independence payments for disabled people, endorsed the completely unjustified culture of fear that exists around trans women and used utterly rancid and dehumanising language to describe immigrants. They’ve not so much continued the punching down of their predecessors as turned it into a pummelling.

And this morning, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson co-wrote a piece for the Telegraph with Health Secretary Wes Streeting in which she said…. Wait for it…. Children need more ‘grit’. They also need to learn to ‘work hard’ Phillipson later told my colleague Nick Ferrari on LBC. This will apparently solve unemployment.

It’s all such desperate sloganeering. The social contract is broken – the proportion of people aged 21-37 still living at home has increased by a third in the past decade.

Rents are skyrocketing whilst wages have stagnated. Increasing numbers of people are reporting they can’t afford to have a family, however ‘hard’ they work.

Meanwhile, we have a recruitment and retention crisis in the teaching profession, schools are still struggling with resourcing and the country is in the midst of a seemingly never-ending ‘cost of living crisis’.

We now better understand the damage smart phones are inflicting on vulnerable people and yet, reportedly in response to pressure from Donald Trump, the government’s Online Harms Bill has been watered down to the point of meaninglessness.

Rather than address any of this, Streeting and Phillipson have leant into a narrative of personal responsibility, blaming kids for not being tough enough.

I used to roll my eyes when people said ‘politicians are all the same’. Now, as I experience a wholly unwelcome sensation of déjà vu, I’m starting to agree with them.

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Natasha Devon MBE presents an LBC show 6-9pm every Saturday

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