I will start by responding to Amendment 62 and thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for this amendment. As he said, we have previously discussed these issues in Committee. As he knows, local authorities have existing duties to identify children and young people in their area who have special educational needs or disabilities—SEND—and to work with other agencies to keep under review the adequacy of provision available to meet their needs. The department supports local authorities in doing so.
I acknowledge the points the noble Lord made, but they are best addressed by our wider reforms to the SEND system. I reiterate that high needs funding is increasing by £1 billion in the current financial year to a total of £9.1 billion. Local authorities have flexibility in how this funding is used, particularly and including to support those with sensory impairments. Separately, pupils with additional needs also attract additional funding through the schools national funding formula, which includes proxy factors for SEND. I reassure him that this will continue under the direct national funding formula. This additional needs funding equates to £6.6 billion in 2022-23 and is not dependent on whether a child has an education, health and care plan. I take the noble Lord’s point about those who may have sensory needs not having education, health and care plans, but there is also additional needs funding in place that is not dependent on those plans being in place.
As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, referenced, the Government recently published their SEND and alternative provision Green Paper, setting out ambitious proposals to improve the experiences and outcomes of children and young people with SEND. He referred to a postcode lottery, and he will know that the Green Paper includes a proposal to introduce national standards for how needs should be identified, assessed and reviewed, as well as the support that should be available for children and young people with SEND, including those with sensory impairments. That is currently out for consultation until 22 July, and we do not want to pre-empt the response.
The noble Lord talked about the litigiousness of the current system, and I agree with him. One of the aims of our reforms is to address that by having clear expectations across the country for parents and children. We hope to reduce that side of the system and take things forward in a more collaborative way.
Turning to Amendment 63, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for their amendment on statutory funding for mental health support in schools. Schools can play a vital role in supporting young people’s mental health. However, as we have discussed previously, tackling this issue cannot be the responsibility of schools alone, and it is not a school’s job to provide specific or specialist treatment interventions.
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Access to specialist support is vital. In February, NHS England and NHS Improvement published the outcomes of a consultation on introducing five new access and waiting time standards for mental health services. This includes a standard for children, young people and their families or carers presenting to community-based mental health services to start receiving care within four weeks of their referral. Those waiting times are backed by record investment of an extra £2.3 billion a year through the NHS Long Term Plan. This includes education mental health practitioners, mentioned in the amendment, who are employed by the NHS to staff mental health support teams. I absolutely agree with noble Lords who said that this needs to be a collaborative effort. It cannot be solved by just the NHS or the education system; we need to work across different points of intervention.
Noble Lords have also said that many children do not need specialist support. Schools can use their funding, including the recovery premium, to provide the pastoral support they need, which can include counselling, where appropriate. Place2Be was mentioned in previous debates and is a good example of how to embed counselling support in the life of a school. But we remain of the view that we should leave schools free to judge what approaches suit their circumstances, including those focused on prevention.
I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, for Amendments 114 and 115, concerning consultation, assessment and reporting on the issue of mental health in schools. As I said, we cannot consider schools in isolation, and I reassure both noble Baronesses that we are taking a joined-up, evidence-based approach to future policy. The Department of Health and Social Care just held a call for evidence, which closed earlier this month, to inform the development of a long-term, cross-government mental health plan, which will encompass prevention and treatment and how sectors, including education, can work together to support this. We also already gather and assess a range of data on children and young people’s mental health to inform policy, and we publish this in our annual State of the Nation report.
We take a similarly joined-up approach to health in our practical programme of support for schools on pupil mental health, training senior leads to put in place whole-school and college approaches, and funding
mental health support teams to support pupils and staff and make links with specialist services. The key thing is that we evaluate whether this programme is making a difference in practice. An interim report of the independent evaluation of the initial trailblazer phase of mental health support teams was published last year, and the final report will be published later this year. In addition, the National Institute for Health and Care Research is commissioning a large-scale impact evaluation, due to start in spring next year.
We agree wholeheartedly with the House about the importance of children and young people’s mental health and the crucial role that schools can play. As the right reverend Prelate said, this is not an either/or but an and/both. We are providing extensive support and evaluating whether it is working.
I acknowledge what the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, said about mental health not featuring in the Bill—both noble Baronesses have said this during our proceedings. But we always have to ask ourselves whether legislation is the right answer to the important problems that we seek to address. Obviously, amendments can provide the opportunity to debate and probe, but I hope I have set out that the Government take this issue seriously and have a programme of action in place. It does not feature in the Bill because it is not necessarily the most effective avenue the Government have to ensure that people get the support they need and that this is based on the right evidence, as has been debated.
Finally, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for Amendment 107, and apologise for not being able to join the meeting that I know she had on this issue. As I set out in Committee, while we agree with the intention of this amendment, we still hold that the effects of the amendment are already covered by the Children and Families Act 2014, which requires schools to make arrangements to support pupils with medical conditions. Since 2014, the department’s statutory guidance on supporting pupils with medical conditions at school has made it clear that school staff, healthcare professionals and parents should all work together to agree the support that a child needs in school to effectively manage their condition. The guidance also states that it is not generally acceptable to ignore medical advice. We therefore expect schools to receive and fully consider the advice of healthcare professionals when making arrangements to support pupils with medical conditions. Were a head teacher to entirely disregard the advice received, they would likely be acting unreasonably, and the school may be in breach of its duty.
I say to the noble Baroness that we have received the version of the guidance provided by her. It was dated April 2014 and published to assist with the implementation of the Act in September 2014. The summary section states that the
“document contains both statutory guidance and non-statutory”
guidance. It states:
“Statutory guidance is set out in bold text”.
The same text is included in the version of the guidance published in September 2014. When the guidance was updated in December 2015, the summary section was revised with non-statutory guidance presented in text boxes. The intention of this change was to make the
distinction between statutory guidance and non-statutory guidance clearer, but this did not change the relevant content; it is the same in all three versions.
I thank noble Lords once again for raising the issues within this debate. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, feels able to withdraw his Amendment 62, and that other noble Lords will not move theirs.