The next item is a statement by the Minister for Education and Welsh Language on supporting mental well-being in education. I call on the Minister for Education and Welsh Language, Jeremy Miles. 

Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd. Supporting the emotional and mental well-being of learners is essential if we are to support every young person to reach their full potential. 

We in Wales have acted at pace. In the current year alone, we have provided record levels of funding to support learners. This has resulted in an additional 24,000 counselling sessions, benefiting an additional 6,000 children and young people. We have provided funding to deliver both universal and targeted well-being interventions for nearly 30,000 children and young people. We have helped to train over 4,000 school staff, and we are rolling our children and mental health adolescent services school in-reach pilots nationally, with over 100 full-time equivalent mental health practitioners providing support directly in schools.

But there is still more to do. Supporting schools to develop a whole-school approach to mental health and well-being is key to our strategy. And that is how we will enable the fundamental changes we all want to see across our education system. The framework on embedding a whole-school approach was published in March and we have made it statutory guidance.

This is a long-term piece of work and I want to ensure that our work in schools is replicated across other public services and across communities. This is why we have ensured strong links between our whole-school approach framework and the Together for Children and Young People NEST/NYTH framework, which complements our whole-school framework by strengthening the response of our partners and the whole system to the well-being of our children and young people.

I also want to ensure our successful work in schools is extended across the whole education system. I've therefore identified further education as a priority for further action. Investment has been made to support the mental health and well-being of both staff and learners within the further education sector, with nearly £7 million allocated to support a range of tailored initiatives. Part of this investment has also been dedicated to the work-based learning and adult learning sectors. Funding is being used to support national, collaborative and institutional projects, which include staff training, peer mentoring and the employment of pastoral coaches and well-being officers, as well as providing counselling.

Higher education also remains a priority. We all know the challenges students have faced since the start of the pandemic. Over the past year, we have allocated an additional £50 million through the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales to help universities address student hardship. This includes £10 million to provide increased support to students facing financial, emotional or mental health difficulties. Support for students in higher education is tailored to their needs, reflecting their status as independent adults and recognising the particular pressures they face around living independently, managing their own money and coping with the challenge of independent study.

I want ambition to be at the heart of our work and, in thinking about the mental, physical and social well-being of our young people, it is therefore right that we consider how and when we learn. As such, we have committed, in the programme for government, to explore reform of the school day and the school year. We haven't had a serious conversation about the way we structure school time in Wales for decades. That's far too long.

Going back to normal without first discussing it in the context of staff and learner well-being, tackling the impact of disadvantage on attainment and curriculum reform, would be a wasted opportunity. I'm leading work on the rhythm of the school day and year, and conversations with learners, with school staff, families, employers, unions and communities across the country over the coming weeks will underpin our wider work. Starting by talking to young people themselves, the school workforce and business representatives, followed by wider national engagement in the run up to Christmas, I will speak at first hand to those who can benefit most from reform and who can best help us shape our proposals.

At the same time, we are reviewing UK and international evidence to identify new ways to provide learners with opportunities to learn new skills and engage in new activities. These opportunities can lead to improved emotional well-being and mental health, increased participation in physical activities, healthier eating habits, improved social skills, as well as increased levels of confidence, school readiness—

Sorry, Minister. Can I remind Members, please, to let the Minister speak and not have private conversations in the Chamber, so others can listen? Sorry, Minister.

Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd. An important part of this is aligning how we access learning with modern patterns of living. Work is now beginning in earnest and I'll announce further details over coming weeks.

To conclude, Dirprwy Lywydd, we in Wales have a proud record of supporting mental health and well-being. And working across the sector, with key partners, we will continue on our journey in supporting a culture change across our education system, where mental well-being is put front and centre in all that we do.

Conservative spokesperson, Laura Anne Jones.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I welcome this statement, Minister. Children across Wales have had an extremely difficult time over this pandemic, and the period has highlighted how vulnerable our children's mental health and well-being is through turbulence and significant change in their lives. Ensuring that every measure is there to support them is paramount as we go forward, and therefore I welcome anything that you could put forward right now in that regard. And I thank you for the work that you've done with Lynne Neagle on it.

Our children need all the support possible. As you said in your statement, you outlined 100 dedicated mental health practitioners. Do you think that that will be enough to cover all schools, and is this number significant enough to cover all the geographical areas? So, I'd just like a little bit more information on that, please.

Of course, we welcome the additional counselling sessions and the training of staff. But it's all very well having the provision in place and having the provision available to be signposted to, but we need people to signpost those children in the right direction in the first place. So, everything that I've said before—and you've heard many times as well, Lynne—is that we need to have dedicated mental health ambassadors throughout student year groups and teaching staff in all of our schools and education providers, so that there is someone there who you can go to, who can signpost you in that right direction to the provision that you're providing and who can look out for the signals of those who are struggling and ask that life-saving question, 'Are you okay?'

And also I welcome what you said, that there's been some staff training, as I said just now. But due to the amount of time that our teachers spend with our children, which is sometimes significantly more than parents, don't you agree with me that it's about time that mental health first aid training formed an integral part of all teachers' training, going forward?

There's also a lot of good work going on in our schools already, as we know. It's important that all learning environments keep talking about mental health, like here in this Chamber, to make sure it's no longer a taboo subject and they're not afraid to admit to any mental health issues or think that they are weak because they do so, because it shows great strength to admit this and to get that help, and that is the message that we need to keep getting across.

We are now more aware than ever of the causes—especially after this pandemic—of mental health issues, but we are also now more aware than ever of what we can do to protect our mental health. Would you agree with me, Minister, that physical activity and socialising have now been recognised as significant and important parts of school life, more so than ever before? And would you agree with me that now is the time to accept the importance of physical activity in the curriculum, invest in it and ensure its importance is recognised in the school timetable—so, I'd welcome your thoughts on that—and to ensure that all schools have all-weather facilities, so physical activity can continue, even in those winter months?

I also note what you say, that you hope there'll be an opportunity for children to develop healthier eating habits, and I wholeheartedly support that. But I hope that, alongside that, also healthier eating options in school meals will be available in our schools—judging from my son's options, it's not that good. So, it is something that we definitely need to look at, if we are serious about that part of our children's well-being.

Also, you said you want to look the structure of school in Wales. This has been bandied around for years, as we know, but I praise you for now saying that you're going to look into it, and with such regard for it. But because, as we know, this would be such a significant change, if you started changing the hours of school and everything else, there really has to be a holistic approach to this. Because the knock-on effect from changing school hours is massive, not only for school transport issues, but parents' working hours, for early years provision, because it all has got to be married together to change the school provision. But I welcome—. Any sort of extension of after-school activities, of course I would welcome. But I'd just like to know your initial thoughts—I know you're looking into it, but your initial thoughts—on how you see the school day panning out. Thank you. 

Diolch to Laura Anne Jones for that wide range of questions. I'll try and do justice to the breadth and depth of the questions that she covered in her contribution. In relation, firstly, to the question of the recruitment of over 100 whole-time equivalent staff to support the work of the CAMHS in-reach pilots and other interventions, I think it is a challenge to meet that target in itself, actually. It's a considerable number of additional professionals to recruit into the system in a reasonably short period of time. I think the experience on the ground is that the health boards are in different places on the journey, dependent on their participation in some of the work of the pilots to date. But I think, actually, that'll be a significant contribution to our agenda in this space.

I think she made a very important point in relation to counselling services and the range of benefits they can bring, but also some of the challenges in delivering that larger scale implementation. I mentioned some of the numbers in my statement, which the funding is intended to cover. Alongside that, she will, I know, be reassured to know that there is a review of the counselling service happening as well, so that we can learn from that, and that'll be followed up shortly by a series of one-to-one consultations with stakeholders across the system, and I think also making sure we capture experiences right across the system will be important. Some of the additional funding that has been made available will be around providing additional training to counsellors, forging links with providers of complementary services, where they're relevant, as well as addressing some of the waiting lists, because there is, as she will know, significant demand in the system at the moment. So, there's a kind of holistic approach being taken to that, the provision of counselling services. 

The Member took the opportunity that she had already taken with my colleague the Deputy Minister for Mental Health and Well-being to raise the point that she makes frequently about mental health first aid. I think I have little to add to my colleague's observations here. What we don't want to do is to follow a path that takes us to a less ambitious outcome than I think the framework is going to take us towards. And really, we share this ambition in Government to make sure that we have the most ambitious approach to mental health in a whole-school context throughout everything that we do. We are mindful that there is a range of resources and interventions available to school leaders in making some of the judgments that they make in implementing the whole-school approach. And so, in order to help them navigate what can be quite a crowded space, I think, if you're making judgments about the best interventions, the best resources to use, we've commissioned Public Health Wales to develop a toolkit of evidence-based interventions, which will support schools in choosing which of the well-being interventions best support the individual—you know, the blend of needs that they have amongst their cohort. That work was paused during the COVID period, but that's actually now restarted, and I hope that that will be a useful tool for schools in addressing some of these questions.

I welcome her support for our emphasis on physical activity in the new curriculum, and indeed in encouraging that in the existing provision. She will know that we have recently provided an additional £20 million in funding to support access to play and sporting, creative and expressive activities, building on the Summer of Fun, through the renew and reform programme, and I know that she shares my passion for making sure that young people have opportunities to support their well-being generally through physical activities.

She closed with some questions in relation to the reform of the school day and the school year. As I say, the conversations with learners—we will start with learners and then the other stakeholders that we work with throughout the system—will be undertaken before the end of this year with a view to consultation in 2022. From my point of view, what I want to see in relation to the school day is to provide a range of opportunities for our learners, building on the things that we have seen have worked over the course of the last year and some of our other responses to the pressures that COVID has brought on our young people. Now, some of that will be about learning, but some of it will be in the way that she was, I think, hoping for, around play and cultural experiences, to have a richer set of experiences for our young people. There are lots of international examples that we can draw on. There are some examples within the UK—other parts of the UK—in Scotland and in England in particular, which we will be drawing on. We are already doing an evaluation of some of those things. Obviously, that will form part of the broader public conversation that follows.

Plaid Cymru spokesperson, Delyth Jewell.

Thank you, Dirprwy Lywydd. Thank you for the statement also, Minister. I wanted to ask you about eco-anxiety or anxiety related to the climate change emergency, which is affecting an increasing number of young people. As you'll be aware, this is an issue that I've been trying to persuade the Government to act upon since the beginning of this Senedd.

Academics at the University of Bath have undertaken an inquiry into this issue, which found that 60 per cent of young people are either very concerned or extremely concerned about climate change. And the academics have also emphasised that eco-anxiety is an entirely rational and understandable fear. So, this isn't about convincing the young people otherwise here, but supporting them in a way. So, may I ask you what changes in the curriculum you would be willing to consider making to deal with this phenomenon of climate change anxiety, and also the evidence on which this anxiety is based? I think that we need to legitimise this concern; we need to demonstrate that we're all listening to young people when they tell us how they feel, that we're also asking them for their ideas, and that we're making them feel less isolated in facing the whole situation.

Of course, we need to focus on the framing, about how young people learn about climate change. It's not just about the disasters, but about the agency that we all have; I repeat, it's about having that agency. I would also like to see more support given to teachers and perhaps more training on how to cope with this anxiety that is being experienced by an increasing number of children.

This is an issue, Minister, on which I think we could make a major difference to children's lives by listening to what they're telling us. I would really like to see movement on this by the Government, and I'd be more than happy, and enthusiastic, to work with the Government on this, and I am genuinely eager to hear your view on what can be done in schools to respond to this eco-anxiety.

And finally, Minister, bearing in mind that climate change is but one huge challenge amongst a number of challenges facing the next generation, how does the Government intend to help children to recover from the stress caused by the pandemic? I know this was mentioned by Laura Jones earlier. Children have lost out on time spent with friends, they've seen parents and relatives suffering, and some have lost members of the family. As with climate change, we can see the impact that the pandemic is having on whole communities, and these young people need to be able to process how they feel in order to learn about sharing experiences and be able to come through such a difficult situation. So, how is the Government going to ensure that support is available in schools to help with this, please?

I thank Delyth Jewell for those questions on two very important areas. In terms of the first, and eco-anxiety, I've already acknowledged in the discussions that we've had how important it is to take this into account, and it's a core part of the work that we're already undertaking in our schools in order to ensure that eco-anxiety, as with a whole range of other anxieties, is part of our understanding of the needs of our pupils.

In terms of the role of that in our curriculum, well, the curriculum, of course, provides for a broad range of changes that will assist teachers in supporting our learners in tackling issues around climate change generally, and eco-anxiety will be part of that. I agree entirely with her that a broader understanding, not only of the challenge, but also in terms of what we as individuals can do, is an important part of responding to that issue of eco-anxiety and issues of well-being and mental health that arise from that. But I would certainly argue that that's at the heart of the curriculum as it is currently designed. It is a constant theme throughout the whole curriculum, and specifically in the context of health and well-being as an area of learning and experience. We are currently providing resources for the new curriculum, and supporting the sector in commissioning and developing those resources, with an emphasis on resources in the context of climate change as part of that. So, I will ensure that we do provide support to provide materials around eco-anxiety as a broader part of that.

The second set of questions related to what support we're providing in dealing with the impact of the pandemic on the mental health and well-being of our young people. I would refer her to the work that the Deputy Minister referred to in her statement—and I've already referred to this—in terms of the whole-school framework. It's a change of culture within schools so that all parts of the school community understand the importance of this agenda and have the skills to provide support for our learners, but also for the education workforce more broadly. And that is a fundamental response to what has happened over recent times. Of course, the foundations were laid pre COVID, but I think we've all learnt just how important this has been over the past year to 18 months.

And in terms of the renew and reform programme, specific funding has been provided within that in order to ensure that we're able to work one to one with those pupils who need that, in order to provide specific support tailored for their needs. That's part of the broader programme; there are many other examples, of course, and I would refer the Member to that document.

Thank you, Minister, for your statement today; I have a few questions arising. A whole-school approach is obviously one that ensures that a policy is embedded across school life, and indeed if it's done well, then that can be the case. However, there is a danger that a whole-school approach, if not well planned and adequately analysed, can, in fact, simply place additional measures on actual teachers to deliver mental well-being support, in addition to their existing curriculum, without additional time being allocated or additional training. What discussions have you had or do you intend on having with teachers and their trade unions to ensure that adequate time and training can be provided to deliver meaningful well-being support?

And, secondly, a key stressor on our learners, which perhaps is not discussed as widely as it should be, is the impact that teacher stress has on them. Teaching is widely recognised as a highly stressful occupation; it would be naive of us to think that teachers don't convey this stress to their students at times. This can be in terms of teacher absence as a result of mental health issues, making continuity and quality of learning difficult, or students picking up on teacher stress during lessons and becoming stressed themselves as a result. Therefore, what work is being done to support teachers with their own mental health issues, and does the Minister agree with me that more needs to be done in this area?

I thank the Member for those two important questions. I think providing sufficient capacity in the system to be able to provide training and develop the professional learning environment that is needed is obviously essential. Part of the investment that we've made, of course, over the recent period is to enhance capacity in our schools to be able to respond to some of the principal challenges of COVID, and that includes questions of well-being, both from the point of view of our learners, but also from the point of view of the teaching and other wider education workforce as well. Teacher well-being is a crucial dimension to that, in the way that her question sets out.

For the last two years, we have funded Education Support, which is, I'm sure she will know, a charitable organisation with expertise in providing support for well-being across the education profession to provide direct support for individuals in schools, but also to provide guidance and advice for teachers, school leaders and managers to give them the tools through which they can then support their staff. Some of that, as I say, is around support for individuals, in particular, perhaps, those practitioners working in highly challenging contexts. Some of it is support for the school on a systemic basis, helping them to create a mentally healthy workplace that benefits all parts of the school community, and some of that has been around well-being workshops booked in for INSET days and a range of other interventions. So, I hope that will provide a significant level of support for the teaching workforce in how they take forward the whole-school approach across Wales.

And finally, Jane Dodds.

Diolch yn fawr iawn, Dirprwy Lywydd. Can I also put on record, on behalf of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, our best wishes to Andrew R.T. Davies in his recovery and thank him for his very bold and clear statements in terms of his mental health?

Minister, I'd like to thank you for bringing forward this very important debate and issue. The mental well-being of our children and young people is so important, and I'm pleased that the Welsh Government are continuing with this whole-school approach to mental well-being, which is integral to the new curriculum, as developed by your predecessor, Welsh Liberal Democrat Kirsty Williams. So, thank you very much for profiling this this afternoon.

I'd just like to highlight the issue around cross-cutting work, because 60 per cent of children and young people attempting to access specialist mental health services through CAMHS are waiting four weeks or more for their first appointment as of July 2021. There's been an increase to CAMHS services of around 350 per cent on the previous year's figures. So, my question and issue really are around how we can work across both health and education to ensure that there is a need to continue to support CAMHS services, but also ensure that children don't fall through the cracks, by making sure that we have adequate whole-school approaches in schools. And, secondly, I wonder if I could ask you what thought you have given to creating a network of mental health support over a 24-hour period, seven days a week for our children and young people. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr iawn.

I thank Jane Dodds for that set of questions and join with her in paying tribute to my predecessor and for her commitment to both curriculum reform and to the agenda of mental health of children and young people, which was a very committed and very considerable priority for her. I hope you will have heard in both the contributions that Lynne Neagle and I have made in the Chamber today how joined up we are within the Government in relation to the interventions that can be made from a health perspective and from an education perspective to try and make sure that that joined-up approach that she identifies as being so important is, and becomes even more so, the reality on the ground. We jointly chair the task and finish group, as Lynne Neagle was outlining earlier, and a number of the interventions in this space are the product of very, very close working between the health department and education department, because we recognise that the very essence of this working is to ensure that children don't fall between the cracks, if you like, and there's a seamless service that supports children and young people in all their mental health and well-being needs. I'm confident that the work that we are putting in from a Government point of view is best designed to reach that outcome, but there are significant challenges in the system in delivering that in the way that I know that she is aware, and I hope that some of the things that we've outlined today in both the statements you've heard so far, and the ones that will follow, demonstrate how committed the Government is to making sure that everyone gets the support they need for their mental health.

Thank you, Minister. We will now suspend proceedings to allow changeovers in the Siambr. If you are leaving the Siambr, please do so promptly. The bell will be rung two minutes before proceedings restart, and any Members who are arriving after a changeover should wait until then before entering the Siambr.

Plenary was suspended at 15:59.

The Senedd reconvened at 16:08, with the Llywydd in the Chair.