1. Will the Minister provide an update on the provision of school counselling services? OAQ55082

Our most recent statistical release, for the period of 2017-18, shows almost 11,500 children received counselling, comparable to numbers in previous years. In the current year, we also made an additional £626,000—no; yes, £626,000—available to local authorities to support improvements to the service as part of our work on developing a whole-school approach to mental health and well-being.   

I thank you for that answer, and it really is a good investment in the well-being of young people. But there was a report by the Children, Young People and Education Committee in 2018, and it reviewed school-based counselling and found that the service was indeed making a significant contribution to building an emotionally resilient population of young people. But there was one area of concern that was raised by the children, and that was the sense of being stigmatised about accessing the service by having to leave school lessons in order to do so. So, my question, really, is: that having been said, Minister, what actions have been taken since that report to reduce that stigma around school-based counselling so that children and young people continue to access what, for them, is a much needed service?

Thank you, Joyce. Well, since the publication of that report, a great deal of work has been undertaken and continues to be driven forward. For example, by making all aware of the availability of both counselling provided in schools, in community-based settings, and, indeed, online, in a virtual world, our revised counselling toolkit, which will be published next month, will, I believe, help reduce stigma and normalise the use of counselling services. Our draft whole-school framework guidance, which will be formally consulted on in the next few weeks, also highlights the need for schools to ensure that spaces provided for school-based counselling and other well-being work should avoid having any such space labelled, so that we can avoid such stigma. 

Of course, as we move towards the delivery of our new curriculum, our health and well-being area of learning and experience will encourage children to take better care of both their physical and their mental health, and encourage help-seeking behaviours as an acceptable response when children feel upset or distressed. 

Some of the schools in my region quite rightly use part of their pupil development grant to help support on-site school counselling services for pupils. What feedback have you had from schools who don't get high levels of PDG, and have seen cuts to their core funding, about the difficulties they might have in offering counselling on site?

Well, Suzy, as I have just answered to Joyce Watson, we are making over £600,000 extra available in this financial year to support counselling services, and, in the new financial year, additional resources will also be made available to look to extend support services for children—traditional counselling, but perhaps group-based approaches for younger children, to extend the help available to all schools. 

Minister, in my constituency—I suppose I declare an interest, first of all, as a trustee of Eye to Eye, who provide some of the youth counselling service in my constituency—the work that is done is really in response to the fact that there are so many issues that are arising amongst young people. And the counselling service and the work that is done, I think, only re-emphasises to all of us how important that work is. What I do wonder is: across Wales, what work is being done to actually collate the overall statistics for the whole of Wales to get a picture of what is happening across Wales in respect of this incredibly important service?

You're right, Mick: we need to ensure that any Government investment and policy response to promoting children's good mental health and well-being needs to be on the basis of evidence. And there are a variety of ways in which we do that. We have the formal statistics that are collated as a part of the formal counselling service. Most recently, in reporting back to the 'Mind over matter' stakeholder group, representatives of the Association of Directors of Education in Wales had canvassed each local authority and had asked for details of services across Wales that both local authorities and schools were employing. And, of course, we also hear from young people themselves, via our support for the healthy schools questionnaire that goes out to young people, where they themselves have an opportunity to express how they're feeling about their own mental health and well-being. So, we use a variety of sources and data collection points to establish a firm evidence base for investment in this important area.