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<p>Children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing is a priority for this
government. While education settings cannot provide specialist clinical care, the
support schools and colleges are providing to their pupils following the return to
face-to-face education should include time devoted to supporting mental health and
wellbeing, which will play a fundamental part in supporting recovery. We want schools
to have the freedom to decide what wider pastoral and extra-curricular activity to
put in place, based on the needs of their pupils and drawing on evidence of effective
practice.</p><p>We are supporting recovery action with significant additional funding.
In June 2021, we announced £1.4 billion of additional funding for education recovery.
This is in addition to the £1.7 billion already committed, bringing total investment
announced for education recovery over the past year to over £3 billion. The package
provides support to children aged 2 to 19 in schools, 16-19 providers and early years.
It will expand our reforms in two areas where the evidence is clear our investment
will have significant impact: high quality tutoring targeted at those that need it
most and high quality training for teachers. The one-off Recovery Premium for state-funded
schools will help schools to provide their disadvantaged pupils with a boost to the
support, both academic and pastoral, that has been proved most effective in helping
them recover from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. This is in addition to the
£650 million catch-up premium shared across state-funded schools over the 2020/21
academic year, which is also supporting education settings to put the right catch-up
and pastoral support in place. The Education Endowment Foundation have published a
COVID-19 support guide to support schools, which includes further information about
interventions to support pupils’ mental health and wellbeing.</p><p>Our Mental Health
in Education Action Group has been looking further at what more can to be done to
help education settings support mental wellbeing as part of recovery. The department
has recently brought together all its sources of advice or schools and colleges into
a single site, which includes signposting to external sources of mental health and
wellbeing support for teachers, school staff and school leaders, as well as guidance
to support relationships, sex and health education curriculum planning, covering of
the key issues children and young people have been concerned about throughout the
COVID-19 outbreak: <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mental-health-and-wellbeing-support-in-schools-and-colleges#mental-health-and-wellbeing-resources"
target="_blank">https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mental-health-and-wellbeing-support-in-schools-and-colleges#mental-health-and-wellbeing-resources</a>
and <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-about-mental-wellbeing" target="_blank">https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-about-mental-wellbeing</a>.</p><p>On
10 May, as part of Mental Health Awareness Week, we announced more than £17 million
of mental health funding to improve mental health and wellbeing support in schools
and colleges. This includes £9.5 million for up to 7,800 schools to train a senior
mental health lead in the next academic year, and £7 million in additional funding
for local authorities to deliver the Wellbeing for Education Recovery programme. This
builds on Wellbeing for Education Return in the 2020/21 academic year, which offered
schools in every local authority and reached up to 15,000 schools with free expert
training, support and resources for staff dealing with children and young people experiencing
additional pressures from the last year, including trauma, anxiety, or grief.</p><p>For
further education, the College Collaboration Fund (CCF), a £5.4 million national programme
of competitive grant funding delivered in the 2020/21 financial year, is helping to
support learner and staff mental health and wellbeing through online programmes and
remote support. One of the funded projects was Weston College’s ‘Let’s Chat’ programme,
which delivered a number of wellbeing support packages accessible at any time to keep
staff, students and their families safe and well during lockdown. We are now assessing
bids for the CCF 2 for the 2021/22 financial year.</p><p>With regards to higher education
(HE), student mental health and suicide prevention are key priorities for this government.
We continue to work closely with the HE sector to promote good practice. We recognise
that many students are facing additional mental health challenges due to the disruption
and uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. My hon. Friend, the Minister of State
for Universities, has engaged with universities on this issue, and has written to
Vice Chancellors on numerous occasions during the past year outlining that student
welfare should remain a priority. She has also convened a working group of representatives
from the HE and health sectors to specifically address the current and pressing issues
that students are facing during the COVID-19 outbreak.</p><p>Universities are not
only experts in their student population, but also best placed to identify the needs
of their student body. The Department for Health and Social Care has overall policy
responsibility for young people’s mental health. We continue to work closely with
them to take steps to develop mental health and wellbeing support.</p><p>We have also
increased funding to specialist services. In March, we announced a £79 million boost
to children and young people’s mental health support, which will include increasing
the number of Mental Health Support Teams. The support teams - which provide early
intervention on mental health and emotional wellbeing issues in schools and colleges
- will grow from the 59 set up by last March to around 400 by April 2023, supporting
nearly 3 million children. This increase means that millions of children and young
people will have access to significantly expanded mental health services. In total,
£13 million will be used to accelerate progress to support young adults aged 18 to
25. This group includes university students and those not in education or training,
who have reported the worst mental health outcomes during the COVID-19 outbreak, and
who sometimes fall through the gap between children and adult services.</p><p>While
it is for HE providers to determine what welfare and counselling services they need
to provide to their students to offer that support, the government is proactive in
promoting good practice in this area. We continue to work closely with Universities
UK on embedding the Stepchange programme within the sector. Stepchange calls on HE
leaders to adopt mental health as a strategic priority and to take a whole-institution
approach, embedding it across all policies, cultures, curricula, and practice. The
Stepchange programme relaunched in March 2020 as the Mentally Healthy Universities
programme. Further information on the programme is available here: <a href="https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/stepchange"
target="_blank">https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/stepchange</a>.</p><p>The University
Mental Health Charter, announced in June 2018, is backed by the government and led
by the HE sector. The charter, developed in collaboration with students, staff and
partner organisations, aims to drive up standards of practice, including leadership,
early intervention, and data collection. Further information on the charter is available
here: <a href="https://www.studentminds.org.uk/charter.html" target="_blank">https://www.studentminds.org.uk/charter.html</a>.</p><p>The
department has also worked with the Office for Students (OfS) to provide Student Space,
a dedicated mental health and wellbeing platform for students. Student Space has been
funded by up to £3 million from the OfS in the 2020/21 academic year. We have asked
the OfS to allocate £15 million towards student mental health in 2021/22 through proposed
reforms to Strategic Priorities grant funding, to help address the challenges to student
mental health posed by the transition to university, given the increasing demand for
mental health services. This will target students in greatest need of such services,
including vulnerable and hard to reach groups.</p>
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