The Department for Education has issued a fresh call to providers who can offer mental health support training for school staff - a project supported by the former mental health minister and now education secretary, Gillian Keegan.
In a government contract updated this week, the DfE published deadlines of 7 November 2022 and 16 January 2023 for would-be providers to submit applications to be accredited to provide training to senior leaders to support pupils with their mental health.
Funding for the scheme was first made available for schools to apply for in September of last year, despite the programme having been first announced in the government’s Green Paper of 2017.
A year ago, up to 7,800 schools were able to apply for a £1,200 grant aimed at training senior leaders on mental health so they could “roll out an effective whole-school or [whole-]college approach to mental health and wellbeing, embedding it into their culture and making it a priority alongside academic recovery”.
The trained senior mental health lead would then be tasked with identifying those who need support and improving access to specialist services.
State-funded primary and secondary schools are eligible, including some special and alternative provision settings.
The DfE has allocated a total of £10 million to the scheme for the 2022-23 financial year - a year-on-year increase of £500,000 from the previous period, after announcing a further £7 million earlier this year.
It said this would enable up to 8,000 more schools and colleges to apply for training grants in 2022-23.
The former children and families minister, Will Quince, said in May that the senior mental health leads would play an important role as part of “vital” efforts to continue supporting the wellbeing and mental health of pupils “alongside their academic recovery”.
And Gillian Keegan, who was the mental health minister at the time, said the past two years had been “particularly challenging” and, although pupils were “incredibly resilient”, it was “crucial” they could access mental health support “as early as possible”.
Ms Keegan, who was this week appointed education secretary, added at the time of the funding announcement in May that the government was making “great progress on better supporting young people’s mental health and this additional funding to train senior mental health leads will complement our work on the accelerated rollout of mental health support teams in schools and expansion of community services, which is well underway”.
A DfE spokesperson said that the updated call was part of ”an ongoing process up until 2025”, when the DfE aims to have training provided to all schools.
The spokesperson said providers who had already been successfully accredited for training need not reapply.
The deadline announcements come in the same week as new government figures show the level of school referrals to child social services has increased by 50 per cent since 2014.
