Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Mental Health, Wellbeing and Welsh Language – in the Senedd at 2:54 pm on 4 November 2020.
Well, thanks very much, Angela. As someone whose child has gone to university this year, I'm one of these people who is very aware of the kind of pressures that many students are under, the first time away from home.
Just to make it clear, in 2019 all universities committed to a step change in relation to mental health, and they came up with proposals where every university was required to submit well-being and health strategies. So, all of those have been received, and so there should be a programme that they're already undertaking. Now, what we haven't done is to, as you suggest, set out a methodology and things at this point. You'll be aware that we've just put an extra £10 million into this area. Now, we could have sat around and said, 'Let's work out the methodology'; we thought it was more important to get the funding in there to really make sure—. We're in a crisis period; we have to get the money to the front line as soon as possible. We've done the same thing in relation to help for health workers. We've got the money there, without the evidence sometimes that there's a massive problem. We're just guessing that there is going to be a big problem, and you're quite right that we probably need to put some methodology behind it now, just to look at whether we are doing the right thing. But we're not starting from scratch here, as HEFCW have done quite a lot of work in this space, but what we probably could do is a bit more of learning best practice to see what works in one university and whether we can share that amongst the other universities. So, thank you for that question.