Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to increase support for emotional and mental health and wellbeing in primary schools.

In 2021/22, we provided an additional £79 million to increase children’s mental health services, including expanding the availability of mental health support teams in schools and colleges. These teams now provide support in approximately 25% of the country and we aim for this to increase to more than 500 teams or 35% of pupils by 2023/24.

Mental health support teams integrate with existing measures, such as counselling, educational psychologists, school nurses, pastoral care, educational welfare officers, local authority provision and National Health Service children and young people’s mental health services. The Department for Education also provided more than £17 million in 2021/22 to increase existing mental health support in education settings. This includes £9.5 million to enable up to a third of schools and colleges to train a senior mental health lead, through the Government’s commitment to fund training for leads in all schools and colleges by 2025.