Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent steps the Government has taken to improve and increase support for student's (a) mental health, (b) safety and (c) well-being.

The mental health and wellbeing of young people is a high priority for the government. It is crucial that students get the effective mental health and wellbeing support they need to allow them to flourish at university.

The department is working closely with mental health charities and the higher education (HE) sector to promote and fund effective practice to support student wellbeing and mental health.

To ensure that the sector goes further to support students, the department has made clear the ambition for all HE providers to sign up to Student Minds’ University Mental Health Charter by 2026 and adopt a whole-university approach to mental health and wellbeing. The charter can be found here: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/charter.html.

Students need timely and effective health support and a smooth transition into university life. The Office for Students (OfS) has allocated £15 million of funding in 2022/23 to establish better partnerships between universities and local NHS services and to support transitions from school and college to university.

The department also wants students across the country to have easy access to the best mental health support tools and for interventions to be based on evidence base practice. The OfS have funded the online platform, Student Space, and are leading work to establish and share ‘what works’ across the sector. Student Space can be accessed at: https://studentspace.org.uk/.

Through the NHS Long Term Plan, the government is investing an additional £2.3 billion a year at least into mental health services by 2023/24. Part of this increased investment will enable an additional 345,000 children and young people aged 0-25 to get the mental health support they need.

The number of children and young people aged under 18 supported through NHS-funded mental health assistance, with at least one contact with services was 689,621 in the year up to July 2022, compared to 618,537 in the year up to July 2021.

Spend for children and young people’s mental health services has increased from £841 million in 2019/20 to £995 million in 2021/22. Total spend for 2022/23 has yet to be confirmed, but we expect it to have risen to around £1.1 billion.