Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the reasons why the UK ranked 40th for children’s well-being out of the 44 countries that took part in the OECD’s PISA 2018 rankings; and what steps the Government is taking to improve its position in those rankings.

Good mental wellbeing is a priority for this Government. The Department is looking carefully at the evidence about children and young people’s mental wellbeing and how to support it. In October 2019, we published the first ‘State of the Nation’ report on children and young people’s wellbeing to bring together the evidence for England, which has shown a slight fall in recent years. The full report is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-nation-2019-children-and-young-peoples-wellbeing.

The Department is taking forward a wide range of work to ensure that wellbeing is at the forefront of our approach to supporting children and young people in schools. This includes teaching pupils about looking after their mental health and wellbeing through the introduction of the new subjects of relationships, sex and health education. This will include the importance of sleep, understanding the benefits of rationing time online and the risks of excessive time spent on electronic devices, including how the content can affect their own and others’ mental and physical wellbeing.

The Department is also improving collaboration with external agencies, to ensure those pupils that need specialist support and treatment get it quickly. In particular, we have a major joint programme of work with NHS England to introduce new mental health support teams linked to schools and colleges, and to support schools and colleges to put in place senior mental health leads.

The Department has several further initiatives in place to support schools to develop and implement whole school approaches to mental health and wellbeing. These include trialling approaches to promoting positive mental wellbeing to ensure pupils have access to evidence based early support and interventions – the largest trial in the world of its kind, piloting different approaches to peer-to-peer support, and rolling out Mental Health Awareness Training to all state-funded secondary schools, to improve capability to identify potential issues.

The Public Health England Rise Above programme in schools and online provides advice for children and young people on coping strategies for modern life. These strategies include dealing with difficult emotions and situations that can lead to problems such as stress, bullying and self-harm. Details can be found here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/phe-launches-rise-above-for-schools-programme.