Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:42 pm on 5 July 2022.
Well, Llywydd, I thank Ken Skates for that, and I agree with him very much that the best help you can offer, particularly to young people, in the mental health field is that early and preventative intervention that gets them the advice they need. It allows them to meet with a trusted adult who has the training that is necessary to respond to their needs, and that's exactly what the Welsh Government is doing. Over the next three years, we'll invest another £10 million over and above what is there now to improve and expand school counselling provision, and we do so because we know that it is effective. In the last year for which there are figures, 10,600 children or young people received counselling services in schools. Young women accounted for two thirds of those receiving help. Twenty per cent of all the children who got help from the school counselling service were in year 10, so facing examinations, with all the anxiety that we know goes alongside that. But, critically, 87 per cent of children and young people who used the service did not require onward referral. In other words, the help that they got was sufficient to meet their needs. That's why, both for children and for adults, we are putting such an emphasis on investment in tier 0 and tier 1 services—services that you don't need to join a waiting list to get to, services that you can get by immediate access, either through third sector organisations or, in the case of the question raised by Ken Skates, through the self-referral of someone to a school counselling service. If you can do it, if you can do it early and do it effectively, then those young people don't need the more intensive and, inevitably, more pressurised services further up the chain.