Caroline Voaden

It is an honour to speak under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I thank the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) for opening the debate. I would like to acknowledge all the people who have signed the petition, and Mark and John for all their work—it is good to see them in the Public Gallery. I speak as someone who has, unfortunately, very personal experience of the issue we are debating today. My husband, 22 years ago, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, when my daughter was two and our baby was just five months old. He died a year later, a week before Ellie’s fourth birthday, when Laura was just 17 months old. They are now brilliant young women, and I am extremely proud of them. But it has been a long journey, and I can say from the bottom of my heart that grief lasts a lifetime. Bereavement issues come and go and change as the children grow up. The grief is quite strange when you are three; you don’t know where daddy has gone. When you are 17 months old, you cannot even speak. I think she could just about say “Daddy”; she was babbling a bit. It is very difficult to explain to a child of that age, so the other parent has to explain again and again, at different stages of life, as the children grow up. One thing we read about in books, which is true, is that for bereaved children it is an issue that keeps coming back. They will be okay for a few years and then they will move school and suddenly it starts all over again. I remember that when both my girls started secondary school there was a conversation: “What do I say? Do I go in and say on day one, ‘Oh, my dad’s dead,’ or do I keep it quiet?” I remarried many years later, and then there was another question: “Do I call him Stuart or do I just say to my friends that he’s dad?” The girls just used to refer to us as “Our parents”, because that was easier. They did not want to have to keep explaining. Retelling the story at school, over and over again, was very difficult. Ellie started school six months after her dad died. I had some brilliant friends who came to the house on day one of school, and we all went together because I knew she would be one of the only kids there who did not have mum and dad at the school gate on day one. It was like that every time: at every school carol concert, every play, every parents’ evening, every sports day, for years, there was a feeling that there should have been someone else there. One thing that was really hard was that I felt every year that I had to tell the class teacher; it was not a whole-school experience, so I had to keep retelling and re-explaining. When children go to secondary school and have lots of different classes with lots of different teachers, it is really quite something that, if things are difficult, we have to keep explaining it again and again. The petition is so important. Perhaps things have changed a bit in the last 21 years, but the fact that no national data is collected is a sign that we still have not got to grips with this issue. The Childhood Bereavement Network estimates that more than 46,000 children in the UK experience the death of a parent every year. That is 127 children who are going through this every single day. We collect data on so many aspects of children’s lives, from school performance to health statistics, and even the number of children affected by divorce, but when it comes to bereavement children are invisible in terms of policy, planning and support, and that absolutely has to change. Bereavement is one of the most difficult experiences that any child can face, yet we have no clear plan or pathway to support children. We know that the impact of bereavement is lifelong and can present emotional and psychological challenges. I remember phoning Winston’s Wish more than once as a parent to ask for some advice when things were kicking off and not going very well, and that organisation was absolutely brilliant. Shortly after—about a year after—Nick died, we joined Widowed and Young, and I eventually went on to chair Widowed and Young for a couple of years. It is an absolutely brilliant organisation and I could not have survived without it. We used to go away for weekends with WAY. I had lots of friends who all had small kids, and I remember the kids were chattering away in the back of the car one day and one of them said to the other, “What’s a brain haemorrhage?”, and the other one explained. For them, it was so normal that all their dads had died. They just talked about it. It was so important for them to be able to connect with other children who had experienced the same thing and they felt able to talk to. Yet at school, it was not part of the conversation. Their friends did not know how to talk about it; they did not really understand. My daughters have often said, “Oh, my friends never mention it; they never talk about it.” It is just brushed under the carpet because they feel awkward. Education about this issue should be on the curriculum. We do not talk about death enough in this country. We have talked about it a lot in this House over the last couple of weeks, but Friday’s debate was also an indication that we really do not have these conversations in Britain. We feel awkward about it, and it is really important that death becomes a much more normal thing to discuss. I am going all over the place, but I will go back to the issue of data, which I have written down. If registrars were required to ask about the number of dependent children at the point when a death is registered, we could at least begin to understand the true scale of the issue. Local authorities could then use that data to make informed decisions about the resources required to support grieving families in their area. Nationally, it would help to make the case for a co-ordinated response to childhood bereavement and ensure that bereaved children get the support they need. Registrars could also signpost people to useful organisations if they knew there were children involved. Believe me, a bereaved parent needs all the help they can get, and knowing there are people out there who understand is really important. The collection of data would also identify children who are not receiving support and would allow local services to monitor whether the services available are meeting the needs of bereaved children, and whether enough children are receiving the help they need. It would also allow us to ask the important question: are our systems reaching these children, and are they getting the right kind of help? Without that data, we cannot ensure that our services meet the scale of the need. On educating children, we cannot expect them to process such a significant loss on their own. We also cannot expect teachers to navigate these issues without proper training and support. There are organisations out there. As the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) said, a lot of this stuff has already been done, and the resources are there to support teachers. By giving children a space to understand death—what it is, what it means and what it is all about—we provide an opportunity for a bereaved child not to feel quite so alone and different. Children need to be able to express their grief and to be supported in doing so, and teachers need to feel empowered to address this difficult subject, to ensure that grieving children do not feel isolated or misunderstood. If such education were part of the curriculum, we could ensure that teachers and support staff have the tools and knowledge they need to support children at the most difficult time in their lives. Grieving children need to feel safe, understood and supported. The impact of losing a parent can be devastating; it affects every aspect of a child’s life for a lifetime. Without understanding the scale of the issue, and without having the right data and systems in place, we are leaving bereaved children to navigate this experience with little support, and leaving their parents to do a really difficult job on their own, without the wider support network they need. It is time that we recognised the needs of bereaved children. I urge the Minister to see what we can do, as fast as we can do it, so that more children get the support they need.