Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Education – in the Senedd at 2:06 pm on 23 October 2019.
Well, Nick, I think it is true to say that we have come some way in talking about suicide, but there is still a huge amount of stigma attached to suicide. And there is often a great nervousness amongst professionals to talk about what are very, very sensitive issues. Often they fear that what they may say may make matters worse, and that is the reason why we commissioned these resources in the first place to give confidence to our professionals working with young people about how it is really important to have these conversations—you can't make it worse—and to skill and empower them to have these discussions. But, of course, we need support services around when teachers and young people identify a problem. That's why we are making additional resources available for our counselling service. That's why we've recently announced a decision to extend our child and adolescent mental health services inreach pilot that was supposed to finish in July 2020; that will run now till the end of the year. And there are additional resources going into those pilots as we speak.
It's important that we don't medicalise the process of growing up—that is also a very important point. But we know that for some children who are under stress, we need timely and impactful interventions. Moving into higher education is yet again another potential trigger point: many people living away from home for the first time, having to establish new friendship groups as well as the academic pressures. And that's why we have made, in this year, £2 million available to the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales to support mental health projects in universities.