Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to improve access to mental health services in primary schools.

The Government’s Green Paper on Children and Young People’s Mental Health sets out an ambitious set of proposals to fill the gap in support for children and young people’s mental health supported by £300 million of funding.

Under these proposals the Government will incentivise and support all schools, including primary schools, to identify and train a Designated Senior Lead for Mental Health – funding new training to help leads put in place a whole school approach to mental health.

The Government is also funding new Mental Health Support Teams working in or near schools to provide earlier access to a wider range of support and treatments and help reduce mental health problems worsening or developing in the first place, so that appropriate and timely referrals are made to NHS services where necessary. A process is underway to identify the first areas of the country to set up and test these new teams. A new four-week waiting time for NHS specialist children and young people’s mental health services will also be piloted so that specialist help is available sooner.

These proposals build on the experience of the pilot of school links to NHS mental health services, which has already helped around 1,000 schools build better links to specialist services and will be rolled out nationally.