“IT’S like a slow-motion car crash that I am powerless to stop and can’t bear to watch or be part of any more.”

This was a heartbreaking response from one of our members responding to a survey on the surge of mental health problems among young people.

The results of a questionnaire, conducted before our annual conference in Liverpool this week, make harrowing reading.

More than 8,000 teachers, school leaders and support staff from across the country took part in our State of Education poll.

They recounted a catalogue of tragedies, with a staggering 83 per cent reporting an increase in mental health problems among their pupils — and at an increasingly younger age.

One commented: “We see much more anxiety and self-harming. We’ve had three suicides in three years in my school alone.”

Another said that children as young as nine were talking about taking their own life.

So what has caused this devastating collapse in young people’s wellbeing? And what do our members, on the front line in schools, do to support these children?

Social commentators have warned for years that austerity is harming the health of our nation. Child poverty is rampant, affecting nine children out of every class of 30.

We have families resorting to foodbanks, pupils with a lack of adequate clothing, children even missing school on rainy days because their shoes won’t stand up to the weather.

Our members tell of pupils coming to school having not eaten breakfast — some have not had a proper meal since the school dinner they had the day before.

Children’s lives are being blighted in towns and cities up and down the country. But, if alarm bells are ringing in the corridors of power, members are seeing little evidence in schools.

It’s clear that this government’s policies on education and school funding are contributing to this destructive situation. 

Our members want to nurture pupils, to help them achieve and succeed in the world.

But schools can’t solve this mental health crisis alone and this government’s underfunding of public services is damaging the next generation from an early age.

When we asked members to identify what prevents them from fully supporting young people experiencing mental health issues, their answers are damning. 

Funding cuts, reductions in teaching and learning support assistants, the “exam factory” assessment system and a mounting and unsustainable workload.

And respondents paint a bleak picture of increasingly underfunded support services — limited access to child mental health services and dwindling specialist SEND assessment — only 30 per cent said they even had access to a school nurse.

It is clear from our survey that resources simply cannot keep pace with demand. Austerity, coupled with the chronic underfunding of schools and external mental health services, is only making matters worse for those children who need our help the most.

And the next generation deserves a lot better.

Kevin Courtney is joint general secretary of the National Education Union.