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Two people have been killed and at least three injured after a car and knife attack on a synagogue in Manchester. The suspect is believed to be dead after he was shot by police on trying to enter the building. Keir Starmer – who says he is “appalled” by the attack, particularly coming on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar – will fly home from a summit of European leaders in Copenhagen to chair a Cobra meeting. Kemi Badenoch says she will scrap Britain’s “failed” climate change laws if the Conservatives regain power, including ditching electric car targets and plans to phase out gas boilers. “We want to leave a cleaner environment for our children,” she said, “but not by bankrupting the country.” The British conservationist Jane Goodall has died aged 91. Widely considered the world’s leading chimpanzee expert, Goodall was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House earlier this year for her “groundbreaking” work, which “redefined our understanding of the connection between humans, animals, and the environment we share”.

Stop treating our children as victims

Pick up any of the many wellbeing questionnaires now being handed out to British schoolchildren and you’ll see a list of “increasingly alarming statements” that they can agree with wholeheartedly, a little, or not at all, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph: “I feel lonely”, “Nobody likes me”, “I cry a lot”, “I worry a lot”. It’s like some “awful multiple-choice fever dream”. Children as young as 11 are being questioned about their gender identity, emotional regulation and life satisfaction – not something I remember agonising over at that age, “my satisfaction levels being largely based on how many strawberry laces I was allowed to eat”. It all seems to imply that as a child you not only have emotional difficulties but are “mired in them”. And when you’re a child, “implications are powerful”.

Schools should, of course, foster an environment where an unhappy child can talk to their teacher. But in many cases this “fetishisation of feelings and happiness” is counter-productive. Schools have become therapeutic institutions “with a bit of maths and grammar thrown in” – teachers are handing out diagnoses they’re not qualified to make and labelling any small slight a “trauma”. As the former Ofsted boss Baroness Spielman said recently, it’s worth remembering that adolescence is full of “lumps and bumps” you have to experience to become a resilient adult. If children are taught to embrace every worry, fear, anxiety and sadness, they’ll never become a “load-bearing wall”. Knowing how to spot when a child is experiencing “more than the ordinary lumps and bumps” is a crucial part of being a teacher. “Pathologising” normal childhood experiences will only “set whole generations up to fail”.