Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 11 February 2020 to Question 11622, on Pupils: Mental Health, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of standardising the tools such as surveys used by schools to monitor their pupils’ wellbeing.

Schools and colleges have an important role to play in supporting the mental health and wellbeing of their pupils by providing support and activities tailored to their particular needs. It is up to schools to decide what support to offer pupils and what measurement tools to use to inform those decisions.

The Department is working on guidance which will build upon the toolkit[1] issued by Public Health England. It will set out how schools can use existing measurement tools to inform different aspects of their provision. The Department will consider the use and suitability of existing tools, and decide whether to take any further action to support schools in the context of that work.

[1] https://www.annafreud.org/media/4612/mwb-toolki-final-draft-4.pdf.