Students: Mental Health Services

(asked on 28th June 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help support students with their mental health.


Answered by
Andrea Jenkyns Portrait
Andrea Jenkyns
This question was answered on 19th July 2022

To ensure that all students have access to dedicated mental health support, no matter where they study, we have asked the Office for Students (OfS) to fund Student Space, a mental health and wellbeing online platform for students, with up to £3.6 million invested so far. Providing vital mental health and wellbeing resources to all students across the country, it has been accessed by over 250,000 students since its launch in August 2020.

We asked the OfS to allocate an additional £15 million towards student mental health in the 2022/23 financial year to help address the challenges to student mental health posed by the transition to university and to support better joined-up working with NHS services. This funding targets those students in greatest need of such services, including vulnerable groups and hard to reach students.

To make faster progress, the OfS will allocate up to £3 million of this funding towards developing stronger partnership working with NHS services. Alongside my hon Friend, the member for Chichester, the former Minister of State for Higher and Further Education chaired a summit in June to launch this work and ensure that the department and the Department of Health and Social Care work together to achieve this common goal.

The department also supports the University Mental Health Charter led by Student Minds. The University Mental Health Charter intends to drive up standards of practice across the higher education (HE) sector and, so far, 41 HE providers have joined the programme. I have written to heads of HE providers to set the ambition that all HE providers sign up within the next five years.

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