Question reference: S5W-31767
- Asked by: Ross Greer, MSP for West Scotland, Scottish Green Party
- Date lodged: 11 September 2020
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Current status: Answered by John Swinney on 25 September 2020
Question
To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answer to question S5W-31513 by John Swinney on 10 September 2020, how many of the school counsellors it committed to are in place; what local authorities have not yet provided access to school-based counselling across all schools, and how many counsellors there are overall.
Answer
This information is not available at this time.
Our priority is to support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing and the availability of counselling is one of the measures we and our local authority partners are putting in place. Providing access to a counselling services in every school will enable young people to access a service in a way that suits their circumstances and needs.
During the period of school closures our local authority partners made excellent progress towards our commitment of having access to counselling services in every school, with almost all authorities having counselling services in place. The COVID-19 pandemic has had an understandable impact on some authorities procurement exercises, however we expect this commitment to be met by the end of October 2020.