Part of Health and Social Care – in the House of Commons at on 29 October 2019.
Nadine Dorries
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health and Social Care
I thank my right hon. Friend for his question and for his work as Secretary of State. He was the longest-serving Secretary of State for Health ever, and he is passionately interested in this subject, too. Yes, we are on track—in fact, we are more than on track—to meet our objective of 25% of schools being covered by a school mental health support team by 2023-24.
The school mental health support teams have been launched in trailblazer areas, and I visited one a few weeks ago at Springwest Academy in Hounslow to see the amazing work the teams are doing with young children. The teams are teaching coping strategies and identifying mental health problems as they arise very early in life, which helps children to deal with those mental health problems now and into adulthood. We are on track and we hope to meet that objective.
Secretary of State was originally the title given to the two officials who conducted the Royal Correspondence under Elizabeth I. Now it is the title held by some of the more important Government Ministers, for example the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.