Schools: Mental Health Services

(asked on 3rd February 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Written Statement of 9 January 2017, on mental health, HCWS397, whether the programme of randomised control trials of preventative mental health support in schools will be tested in (a) primary schools, (b) secondary schools and (c) colleges and further education establishments.


Answered by
Edward Timpson Portrait
Edward Timpson
This question was answered on 13th February 2017

Good mental health and wellbeing is a key priority for the Department. We have high aspirations for all children and young people and want them to be able to fulfil their potential. Counselling can play an important role in this, which is why we worked with experts to produce a blueprint for effective school-based counselling. We published an updated version of this advice last year. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/497825/Counselling_in_schools.pdf

The Prime Minister announced last month that the Department would launch a programme of randomised control trials of preventative programmes across three different approaches to mental health promotion and prevention.

We are currently working to procure contractors and plan to issue a prior information notice this month, followed by a call for expressions of interest in March, with the aim of having a final contract in place during May. The timetable for delivery will depend on each individual intervention trialled.

We envisage the contract will cover a suite of programmes and approaches to be tested in both primary and secondary schools. We acknowledge that colleges and further education establishments play an important role in supporting young people with mental health issues. However, given the wish to focus on early prevention activity and the nature of the approaches we have been considering that to date we are currently not planning on trialling the interventions for older young people. However, our procurement approach for this programme will allow further trials to be added if needed. We will be giving further consideration to how to improve preventative activity as we develop the new green paper on children and young people’s mental health.

There is already a large scale randomised control trial of school-based counselling underway: The ETHOS study, which is funded by the Economic & Social Research Council and led by the University of Roehampton. Department for Education officials are represented on the steering group to ensure it informs policy.

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