Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of the Boxall Profile in ensuring early identification of child behavioural and emotional issues and help track the progress of pupils' social and emotional development.

To drive improvements across children and young people’s mental health services, an additional £1.4bn funding is being made available over the next 5 years to transform children and young people’s mental health services to deliver more integrated and accessible services.

We recognise that schools can play a significant role in promoting good mental health and wellbeing. This is important in its own right and we know that mental health problems can have a significant impact on attendance and attainment and life chances in the longer term. We believe that schools are best placed to decide what approaches will be most suitable for their pupils.

The Department is contributing £1.5 million to a joint training pilot to test out single points of contact in schools and specialist mental health services, as well as improving local referral routes for those children and young people who need access to specialist services.

Ministers and officials have met the Nurture Group Network and visited schools where nurture groups are in place, who have talked about how the use of the Boxall profile in the nurture group context has helped their pupils. The Network was one of a number of organisations who were involved in producing our blueprint for school-based counselling services, which was published last year and describes the features of good support in a whole-school context. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/counselling-in-schools.

We have also issued advice on mental health and behaviour which clarifies the responsibility of the school, points to tools that can be used to help them identify pupils that may be experiencing a mental health problem, and outlines what they can do to provide a stable environment that builds good mental health in all pupils. Nurture groups are one of the interventions highlighted. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mental-health-and-behaviour-in-schools--2

We want to get a national picture of the interventions used by schools and what they find to be effective. The department recently issued an Expression of Interest for a large scale survey of schools and colleges which will explore their activity to support their pupils’ mental health and development of character traits. This survey will report with detailed national estimates of schools and colleges’ activity including their offer of targeted support such as nurture groups and use of tools like the Boxall profile. It will also seek qualitative evidence on the activities schools and colleges find effective in improving mental health and developing desirable character traits.