Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on expanding the number of mental health clinicians working in schools.

We have committed to deploy mental health support teams to approximately 35% of schools and colleges by 2023. The role of education mental health practitioner has recently been added to mental health support teams. Since 2019, 1,164 practitioners have completed the one-year training. A further 503 are in training, with 221 due to complete training in September 2022 and the remaining 282 in January 2023. A further 456 training places have been commissioned, with 245 starting in September 2022 and the remaining 211 in January 2023. These cohorts will be available to join services in schools in September 2023 and January 2024 respectively.