Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of mindfulness teaching in (1) schools, (2) colleges, and (3) universities.

The Department for Education remains committed to long term improvements to support children and young people’s mental health, set out in the government’s response to its Green Paper and NHS Long Term Plan. This includes the roll-out of mental health support teams and the provision of training for Senior Leads for Mental Health in schools and colleges.

As part of this, we are producing evidence about what works to support mental health and wellbeing in schools, so that they can make evidence-based decisions about how to best support their pupils’ mental health and wellbeing. The department is funding a large-scale programme of randomised control trials of mental health interventions in schools. The aim of this programme is to provide robust evidence on what works to support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing and whether programmes can be delivered effectively in a school setting.

The programme is testing the effectiveness of 5 different approaches to supporting pupil mental health and wellbeing in primary and secondary schools across England. It includes a programme of brief mindfulness-based exercises to be run by teachers in the classroom, which provides teachers with a short training session and materials to run brief mindfulness-based exercises with their classes.

The government has not made an assessment of the effectiveness of mindfulness in colleges and universities. It is for higher education providers as autonomous bodies to identify and address the needs of their student body and decide what mental health and wellbeing support to put in place.