Student Mental Health

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Education and Welsh Language – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 16 June 2021.

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Photo of Jeremy Miles Jeremy Miles Labour 1:51, 16 June 2021

Certainly. In a further education context, obviously, individual institutions provide their own well-being and mental health support for students in a wide variety of different ways, from counselling, online support, resilience training—there's a wide range of options that individual institutions deliver to their students. They've all developed and are implementing well-being strategies to support those. What we've seen in the projects undertaken in the last financial year is that a range of resources have been developed that can be mainstreamed and made available across the profession, if you like, and they'll be available on Hwb, in fact, this summer, so those resources are available more widely. And we've made a further allocation of £2 million for this financial year that will help maintain some of the partnerships that underpin some of those initiatives, and we're basing some of the interventions that we're making on recommendations from project reports that we had back in March, which gives us an evidence base for what works.

In higher education, as the Member mentions in his question, we invested £10 million most recently, and I met, as well, with the NUS president a few weeks ago to discuss the priority this is—the shared priority, if I can put it like that—for us and the NUS. She was very clear to me on how significant some of the challenges are that students are facing. What that funding enabled universities to do was introduce a range of measures and interventions, and the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales is undertaking an evaluation of those measures at present. There are some interim results that will be coming shortly, and then, in July, a fuller report on how effective some of those have been, and I'll be looking forward to seeing what impact those have had on the ground then.