Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the announcement on 7 June of grants worth more than £750,000 to help schools and colleges respond to the impact of COVID-19 on mental health and wellbeing, how many schools have received funding; and how much of that funding each such school has received.

Access to mental health support is more important than ever during the COVID-19 outbreak. We have been working closely with partners to provide resources and update guidance to support and promote children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing during the COVID-19 outbreak.

As part of a package of support for schools on 7 June, we announced more than £750,000 funding would be available to three anti-bullying organisations. These include the Diana Award, the Anti-Bullying Alliance and the Anne Frank Trust. This is to help hundreds of schools and colleges build relationships between pupils, boost their resilience, and continue to tackle bullying both in person and online. More details are available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/extra-mental-health-support-for-pupils-and-teachers.

We have since made progress on the other support to schools. The department in collaboration with Public Health England and NHS England, delivered two webinars in July to provide further mental health support. The first webinar was for schools and colleges to support teachers in promoting and supporting the mental wellbeing of children and young people during the COVID-19 outbreak. The second event was for stakeholders across the local system to support strengthening of local partnerships to further support children and young people’s mental health as they return to school. We had around 10,000 sign up to the first webinar and around 1,300 to the second, and they are now available online for wider use.

There have been over 19,000 unique downloads of the relationships, sex and health education training module on teaching about mental wellbeing since it was published on 8 June. The guidance for schools is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/schools-and-colleges-to-reopen-in-full-in-september.

To support the return to school, the government has also announced an additional £650 million ‘catch-up’ premium, as part of our wider £1 billion COVID catch-up package, to be shared across all state-funded schools over the 2020-21 academic year. The Education Endowment Foundation have published a COVID-19 support guide to support schools to direct this funding, which includes further information about interventions to support pupils’ mental health and wellbeing. Details can be found here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/billion-pound-covid-catch-up-plan-to-tackle-impact-of-lost-teaching-time.