My Lords, taking first Amendment 145, the Government recognise that some pupils, such as those with mental ill-health, may face greater barriers to attendance than their peers. To ensure that all pupils receive the support they need to remove barriers to attendance, the department has recently published new attendance guidance entitled Working Together to Improve School Attendance. Through this Bill, we intend to make this guidance statutory.
The new guidance sets a clear expectation on all schools to have an attendance policy that is applied in such a way that it considers the individual needs of pupils and supports pupils to overcome barriers to attendance. This includes supporting pupils with mental ill-health, so that they can attend school regularly.
This is in addition to obligations under the Equality Act 2010 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ofsted will consider schools’ efforts to improve or sustain high attendance as part of its regular inspections, which includes efforts on their attendance policies.
On Amendment 170, it is right that schools should be accountable for their role in supporting their pupils’ mental health, but requiring Ofsted inspectors to assess pupils’ mental health and then to restrict inspection outcomes on that basis, as this amendment would do, would place responsibility for pupils’ mental health squarely on the shoulders of the individual school. I hope your Lordships would accept that that is not appropriate. Many factors can influence a pupil’s mental health and some of these, such as the culture of a school, are inside the school’s control, but many others are not.
As I think noble Lords have agreed on previous debates on mental health, it is not for schools to take on the role of providing specialist mental health support. It is important that we hold schools to account for the right things: delivering a high-quality curriculum that meets people’s needs; providing strong pastoral support; promoting a strong ethos and an inclusive culture; ensuring pupils are safe and feel safe; and engaging effectively with parents and local services. These elements play a key role in supporting pupils’ mental health and are an essential focus of Ofsted’s school inspections.
On Amendment 171M, the department already gathers and assesses a range of data on children and young people’s mental and physical health to improve our understanding and inform the support we provide children, young people and education settings. We do this through publishing an annual State of the Nation report. The department also undertakes and publishes pupil, parent and teacher omnibus surveys, which include a range of questions about the type and level of mental health support provided in schools.
What the debate has been trying to get at—and we have had this for several days in Committee—is thinking through and making sure the Government continue to be held to account for improving the provision of mental health services for young people, including in the support they get through schools. We have put quite a lot of thought and work into that, but there is definitely more to do.
To take the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, we have a policy of putting funding in place so that every school can have a mental health lead trained by 2025. That mental health lead can take a whole-school view of the school’s role in supporting pupils’ mental health. A lot of that might be about prevention, discussion in PSHE classes, the school’s ethos and other things. They will then be equipped with the training to make sure they develop the right approach for their school, but we know that they should not provide specialist mental health support. That is why we are rolling out mental health support teams to provide both early support within schools and that link to specialist support. That is funded by the NHS.
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However, those teams are no good if the services are not there for students to access. This is why we are increasing funding to children’s and young people’s
mental health every year; it is going up as a proportion of spend compared to both adult mental health and the NHS overall. Noble Lords have made the point about pace, and I appreciate this because, even with the money there, it takes time to scale up those services. So it is not that we are complacent or claim to have all the answers, but I reassure noble Lords that we have thought this through from the perspective of the funding for the specialist services and the link between schools and those specialist services. We are then equipping teachers within those schools to think about what can be done within the school itself. I think we are making good progress on that.
As a final point on pace, we are ahead of our aims on those specialist mental health support teams. We were aiming for them to be in a quarter of schools by next year, but as we are already at 26%, we have increased our ambition to 35% of schools. Again, we need to go further, but I hope that this provides some reassurance to noble Lords on what we are doing and how seriously we are taking it.
On the NHS side of things—which noble Lords have touched on—there is a series of commitments about introducing new access and waiting time standards for mental health services to ensure timely access to community health care. This includes a new access and waiting time standard for children and young people, and their families or carers, presenting to community mental health services to start receiving care within four weeks from referral.
Finally, on Amendment 171Y, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, as noble Lords are aware, free eyesight tests are available at opticians, funded by the NHS, for all children under 16 and for young people under 19 who are in full-time education. Further, vision screening is usually carried out for four and five year-olds, most often in school settings, to check children’s eyes. Under the opportunity area programme, we are running the Glasses in Classes scheme in five disadvantaged areas in England. We are also trialling a feasibility study into school-led vision checking across schools on the North Yorkshire coast. While it remains the case that qualified NHS staff and opticians are best placed to undertake regular annual vision screening for most children and young people, I hope that noble Lords are reassured by the extensive work the Government are doing.
Returning to the point on mental health, I hope that I have provided a better picture of what we are doing and how we have thought about our actions in this area. With that, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, can withdraw her amendment.