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 allocated funding from the public purse to enable schools in Easington constituency to establish mental health and wellbeing teams to support pupils.

Our Green Paper on children and young people’s mental health aims to improve the provision of services through its key proposals, one of which is to create new Mental Health Support Teams in and near groups of schools and colleges in their areas.

In December 2018, we announced 25 Trailblazer sites to run the first wave of 59 Mental Health Support Teams. The first of these teams are now becoming fully operational.

On 12 July 2019, we announced that further Mental Health Support Teams are to be set up across 57 sites. Easington, through Durham Dales, Easington and Sedgefield Clinical Commissioning Group, is one such site.

The teams form part of the National Health Service’s commitment in the NHS Long Term Plan, which commits at least a further £2.3 billion a year to mental health services by 2023/24.