Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Education – in the Senedd at 2:13 pm on 23 May 2018.
Thank you, Lee, for that important question. Having recognised the difficulty that some schools can have in obtaining specialist services, I and the Cabinet Secretary for health have been able to join forces and to combine a monetary resource from both of our budgets to joint-fund the £1.4 million CAMHS inreach project that is happening on a pilot basis in a number of areas across Wales. The purpose of that pilot is to understand how best we can support teachers and school staff to support their children and what the most effective mechanism of putting specialist mental health services into schools actually is. We will be reflecting on that pilot with a view to, if possible, if it's a success—and I believe that it will be a success—rolling that programme out further.
As we develop our new curriculum, it'll be important that we are in a position to provide the professional development opportunities for teachers so that they know how best to address some of these issues, and we continue to look at innovative practice across Wales, where we can to see if we can make improvements. So, recently, at the invitation of Paul Davies, I was able to visit Ysgol y Preseli, which has a very innovative approach to promoting children's health and well-being as part of an international research project with Harvard University. The impacts there are very, very real. It's innovative work and I was very pleased to see it. Officials will be exploring whether there is more that we can do in other parts of Wales to build on the experiences of Ysgol y Preseli, where the focus is very much on early intervention and building children's self-esteem, their self-worth and positive attitudes towards their learning and building up their optimism that, actually, they can succeed in school and that, by succeeding in school, they can live a better, happy, healthier life.