Family breakdown, exam anxiety and peer pressure are driving a growing number of children and young people to suicide, self-harm, educational under-perform- ance and social isolation, teachers said yesterday.

Between 600 and 800 young people — the equivalent of the population of a small secondary school — commit suicide each year. They represent the extreme end of a depressing spectrum of social dysfunction and fractured childhoods prevalent in England today, delegates at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ (ATL) annual conference in Torquay were told.

John Harkin, from Oakgrove Integrated College in Londonderry, said that teachers were often best placed to detect young people in extreme distress, yet too often felt ill-qualified to help. He called for a greater emotional openness in schools and for more training for teachers in how to talk to pupils about their problems so that they could refer them to specialist help before it was too late.

Mr Harkin was speaking amid nationwide concern about a spate of teenage suicides in South Wales. “Who could fail to be moved by the tragedies of Bridgend? Across the UK, in all of our communities, young lives are ending prematurely through what has been called ‘the permanent solution to a temporary problem’,” he said.

His comments coincided with the publication of an ATL survey of 800 teachers which found that three quarters believed that children were under more stress now than a decade ago. The pressures of preparing for tests and exams, and family break-up, were behind a rise in self-harming, anorexia and bullying, the findings suggested.

Mary Bousted, the union’s general secretary, said that young people faced intolerable strain from an education system that cannot stand failure.

Phil Whalley, of Hardenhuish school in Chippenham, Wiltshire, said research had shown that lack of stability at home was a key reason why pupils failed at school, regardless of their economic background. “No matter how brilliant the lesson, or how much has been spent on rebuilding the school, if a child comes in in emotional turmoil because of their family life they will not learn.”

Lesley Ward, from Doncaster, who has been a teacher for 32 years, said that she taught many “lovely” children from poor and often chaotic homes. “Every term we have to check what surnames we are going to call them,” she said. “We have got some girls who have babies to six, seven, eight different chaps. They don’t think they are dysfunctional at all and in their own light they are not.

“But when you look at them from an educated point of view, some are very dysfunctional. There’s a large minority who are struggling just to survive and that leads to a culture of ‘if my Mum can’t buy it, I will nick it’.”

Often their mothers were holding down three or four jobs on minimum wage, while their eldest child looked after the others. “They are lovely, lovely children but they are losers before they even start,” she said.

The union is calling for an independent Royal Commission to investigate why so many of Britain’s children are unhappy. This comes after a report from the United Nations Children’s Fund suggesting that British pupils were the unhappiest in the West, another from the Children’s Society asserting that consumerism was making children depressed and research from the University of Cambridge primary review that younger children were affected by a worrying “loss of childhood”.

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