Schools: Mental Health Services

(asked on 22nd October 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to support primary and secondary schools in their provision of mental health support to children and young people.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 2nd November 2020

??The government is committed to promoting and supporting the mental health of children and young people.

We have in particular prioritised children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing during the COVID-19 outbreak. Getting children and young people back into school and college is itself key to their wellbeing. We have worked hard to ensure that all pupils and learners were able to return to a full high-quality education programme in September. Our £1 billion COVID-19 catch-up package, with £650 million shared across schools over the 2020-21 academic year, is supporting education settings to put the right catch-up and pastoral support in place.

To ensure that staff are equipped to support wellbeing as children and young people returned to schools and colleges, we made it a central part of our guidance both on remote education and on the return to school. We supported this with a range of training and materials, including webinars which have been accessed by thousands of education staff and accelerating training on how to teach about mental health as part of the new relationships, sex and health curriculum, so that all pupils can benefit from this long-term requirement.

To continue this support, we are investing £8 million in the Wellbeing for Education Return programme, which will provide schools and colleges all over England with the knowledge and practical skills they need to support teachers, students and parents, to help improve how they respond to the emotional impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. The programme is funding expert advisers in every area of England to train and support schools and colleges during the autumn and spring terms. More information is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/wellbeing-for-education-return-grant-s31-grant-determination-letter.

In the long term, we remain committed to our major joint green paper delivery programme with the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England. This includes introducing new mental health support teams?linked to?schools and colleges,?providing training for senior mental health leads in schools and colleges,?and testing approaches to?faster?access to NHS specialist support. Mental health support teams are part of the commitment made in the NHS England Long Term Plan that funding for mental health services will grow faster than the overall NHS budget, creating a new ringfenced local investment fund for all ages worth at least £2.3 billion a year by the 2023-24 financial year. This will mean that that by the 2023-24 financial year, at least an additional 345,000 children and young people aged 0-25 will be able to access support via NHS England funded mental health services.

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