Pupils: Mental Health

(asked on 7th June 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment his Department has made of trends in the level of pupils' mental health and wellbeing during the covid-19 outbreak.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 10th June 2021

We are working with the Department of Health and Social Care to monitor the emerging evidence on the experiences of children and young people during the COVID-19 outbreak to ensure the support measures being put in place by the government, including in the longer term, are informed by the most up-to-date evidence.

In particular, Public Health England is monitoring the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak, including on children and young people, and is publishing regular surveillance reports. Their report about population mental health and wellbeing in England during the COVID-19 outbreak was last updated on 8 April: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-mental-health-and-wellbeing-surveillance-report.

On 10 October 2020, the Department for Education published its second annual ‘State of the Nation’ report, which focused on children and young people’s experience associated with wellbeing during the COVID-19 outbreak. The report has helped the government, children and young people’s services, schools, parents and anyone interested in children and young people’s wellbeing to understand children and young people’s experiences of the COVID-19 outbreak, the measures put in place to reduce the impact of the outbreak, and the broader effects on society.

The department has also been collecting regular survey data on children and young people’s wellbeing and experiences during the COVID-19 outbreak. We expect to publish this data in the autumn.

Children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing is a priority for this government. We have supported schools and colleges to put the right pastoral support in place through the Wellbeing for Education Return scheme in the 2020/21 academic year, which funded expert advisers in every English local authority to offer training, support and resources for staff dealing with children and young people experiencing additional pressures from the last year – including trauma, anxiety, or grief. Our Mental Health in Education Action Group highlighted that schools and colleges continue to need help to understand, navigate and access the range of provision available locally, so we provided an additional £7 million funding to local authorities to provide further expert support to do this through the Wellbeing for Education Recovery programme.

On 5 March 2021, we announced an additional £79 million to accelerate the significant planned expansion of children and young people’s mental health services, which will allow around 22,500 more children and young people to access community health services; this includes 2,000 more children and young people getting access to eating disorder services and accelerating the coverage of mental health support teams over the financial year 2021/22. This will enable community mental health services to provide more children and young people more timely care.

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