They start with a mouse

One morning in Robie H. Harris’s picture book Goodbye Mousie, a boy tickles his pet’s tummy and Mousie does not wake up. His father says the mouse has died. The boy insists Mousie is only very sleepy. Then he is angry with Mousie for dying, and then he is sad. They put him in a shoebox with a few favourite things and bury him in the garden. At the end the boy thinks about getting another mouse. “But not just yet.”

Child Bereavement UK’s free lessons for Key Stage 1 start there: the key concepts of alive and dead, exploring feelings related to loss, and how you might sit with a friend. Jan Ormerod drew the book from a child’s height. It is a pet on purpose. A mouse is a way in.

The Department for Education’s revised Relationships, Sex and Health Education guidance came into effect on 1 September. By the end of primary school, pupils in England should know “that change and loss, including bereavement, can provoke a range of feelings, that grief is a natural response to bereavement, and that everyone grieves differently.”

The PSHE Association lists that sentence among the new primary content. It also says many schools were already teaching it. The official list has caught up with what most teachers already knew: there is likely to be a child in the room who has lived it.

The number of affected children is difficult to know.. The Childhood Bereavement Network, Child Bereavement UK and others have asked the government to record how many children lose a parent or sibling. Until that happens they work from estimates. About 26,900 parents die each year in the UK leaving dependent children: one parent every twenty minutes, averaged across 2019 to 2021. Those deaths leave around 46,300 children aged 0 to 17.

The line you hear most often is one in twenty-nine. That comes from a 2004 survey of five-to-sixteen-year-olds, the last national one of its kind, in which about 3.5 per cent had already been bereaved of a parent or sibling: roughly one child per classroom. Mortality has fallen since. The Network hopes the rate has too. It still uses the figure because there is nothing newer.

For older primary pupils the same charity’s lessons move from the mouse to family. They use Oliver Jeffers’s The Heart and the Bottle, in which a girl’s father is gone from his chair, and Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, which he wrote after his son Eddie died at eighteen. Quentin Blake drew the illustrations. Rosen’s book is twenty-two years old.

Secondary teaching is supposed to build on the primary content. Child Bereavement UK, which now includes the work that used to sit under Winston’s Wish, publishes free plans through to Key Stage 4: what grief can feel like in a teenager, and what you might actually do for a friend.

Child Bereavement UK’s helpline is 0800 02 888 40.