Children: Mental Health

(asked on 28th September 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to prioritise policy on the mental health and wellbeing of children.


Answered by
Vicky Ford Portrait
Vicky Ford
This question was answered on 6th October 2020

The government is committed to promoting and supporting the mental health of children and young people. The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) has policy responsibility for children and young people’s mental health. We are working closely with them and taking significant steps to support the mental health and wellbeing support for children and young people in education.

We have particularly prioritised children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing during the COVID-19 outbreak. Getting children and young people back into school and college is itself key to their wellbeing. We have worked hard to ensure that all pupils and learners were able to return to a full high-quality education programme in September. Our £1 billion COVID-19 catch-up package, with £650 million shared across schools over the 2020-21 academic year, is supporting education settings to put the right catch-up and pastoral support in place.

To ensure that staff are equipped to support wellbeing as children and young people returned to schools and colleges, we made it a central part of our guidance both on remote education and on the return to school. We supported this with a range of training and materials, including webinars which have been accessed by thousands of education staff and accelerating training on how to teach about mental health as part of the new relationships, sex and health curriculum, so that all pupils can benefit from this long-term requirement.

To continue this support we are investing £8 million in the Wellbeing for Education Return programme, which will provide schools and colleges all over England with the knowledge and practical skills they need to support teachers, students and parents, to help improve how they respond to the emotional impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. The programme is funding expert advisers in every area of England to train and support schools and colleges during the autumn and spring terms. Further information about the Wellbeing for Education Return programme is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/wellbeing-for-education-return-grant-s31-grant-determination-letter.

In further education, the department has provided £5.4 million of competitive grant funding through the College Collaboration Fund and 5 of the projects funded support student and staff mental health and wellbeing through online programmes and remote support.

In the long term, we remain committed to our major joint green paper delivery programme with DHSC and NHS England, including introducing new mental health support teams linked to schools and colleges, providing training for senior mental health leads in schools and colleges, and testing approaches to faster access to NHS specialist support. Mental health support teams are part of the commitment made in the NHS England Long Term Plan that funding for mental health services will grow faster than the overall NHS budget, creating a new ringfenced local investment fund for all ages worth at least £2.3 billion a year by 2023-24. This will mean that by 2023-24, at least an additional 345,000 children and young people aged 0-25 years will be able to access support via NHS England funded mental health services.

We are also continuing to prioritise the mental health and wellbeing of vulnerable children, including by supporting the £7 million ‘See, Hear, Respond service’ led by Barnardo’s, in partnership with national children’s charities and local organisations, to support vulnerable children at most risk of harm or having negative experiences on their health and wellbeing. Providing additional support through a £6.5 million COVID-19 Adoption Support Fund scheme to support 61,000 adoptive and special guardianship families and extending our £1 million mental health assessment pilots for looked-after children until March 2021. We will also be considering the issues around provision for children and young people with social, emotional and mental health issues as part of our special educational needs and disabilities review.

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