Pupils in eligible schools and colleges are set to benefit from a trained senior mental health lead whose role it will be to identify individuals in need of further support and improve access to specialist services.
Up to 7,800 eligible institutions can apply for a grant of £1,200 which can be put toward training senior leaders to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to implement a ‘whole school or college approach’ to mental health and wellbeing.
£9.5 million of government funding, initially announced in May, has been put into the scheme. The investment will cover training on how to use existing mental health resources more effectively, identify students who need mental health support, and how to improve working with local mental health services to ensure specialist help is directed to those in need of it as soon as possible.
The launch of the mental health training programme came after the ‘Big Ask’ survey published by the Children’s Commissioner for England revealed that over half the children in England consider having good mental health to be a priority.
Children and Families Minister, Will Quince, commented: “I’m always impressed by the resilience and tenacity of our young people, but we know they have faced huge challenges during the pandemic, so we owe it to them to prioritise their mental health and wellbeing as we build back better.
“This training is part of the £17 million package we’ve put in place to build on the mental health support available in schools, which also includes work to help education staff respond to children who may have experienced trauma, anxiety, or grief.
“Today marks an important step forward in our commitment to making wellbeing a central part of education recovery, by giving school and college staff the confidence to not only teach about good mental health but also understand what steps to take if they feel a pupil is struggling.”
While the grant toward mental health training only covers up to 7,800 eligible schools and colleges, the government has committed to offering this type of training to all state schools and colleges by the year 2025.
The rollout of these training programmes across schools and colleges nationwide will be critical for so many institutions who wish to deliver on their priorities for pupils, one of which is the United Colleges Group. This coalition provides further education across five different campuses in London and is the third-largest provider of further education in the capital.
Group Principal Stephen Davis has been vocal for some time about the need for the education sector to get mental health services right and tackle the negative consequences of poor mental health. In an interview with The Parliamentary Review in 2020, Davis singled out the issue of poor mental health arising from social exclusion as a root cause of some of the violent protests seen throughout the country during that year.
Davis said: “It could be argued that social exclusion is manifesting itself in the current levels of violence that are taking place in London and other cities in our country. We are now seeing that, for many young people, this environment of violence is the ‘new normal’.”
Davis also spoke of the need for greater levels of funding into mental health services, to ensure that pupils without an Education, Care and Health plan are not allowed to slip through the net and suffer from not having access to the support that they require.
Davis recalled: “We once had a student who had been excluded from school join our college but without any declaration of their Education Care and Health plan. This was a fundamental disconnect between their pupil journey and their post-16 educational journey and is an example of how a young person who is already at a disadvantage continues to face barriers to progress at every point.
“The arbitrary lines drawn in the funding sand take no account of the complexity of the student journey and the rate of change for those students in their lives.”
With young people’s mental health now becoming more of a priority for government, Davis and his colleagues can hope that Britain's institutions will soon be better equipped to meet the needs of current and future students and - in line with the United Colleges Group’s own values - ensure that young people can be better supported through the challenges and difficulties they face so that they can develop into the very best people they can be.
An updated whole school approach to mental health guidance [building on the initial guidance published on the issue in 2015 by the Department for Education, Public Health England, and the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition] will also provide schools with further information on how to develop mental health and wellbeing practices that help support all of their pupils, the government has said.
The new guidance is supported by a wide range of research, which has indicated that a coordinated approach to mental health and wellbeing can lead to better emotional health and wellbeing outcomes in young people and equip them better for learning.
