It's a cause of great concern to us all, of course, in terms of the impact of this crisis on mental health and well-being among our children and young people. So, what assessment has the Government undertaken of the impact on these aspects in young people and what work is being done to understand the impact of the pandemic? What longer term measures will be put in place and what support services will be put in place?
Again, I think it's helpful that you've already heard from the education Minister last week, because I think the first of her key principles for returning to school is the impact on the emotional health and well-being of children. So, children's mental health was a central concern and remains so for both myself and the education Minister. Part of the honest challenge, again, is that we don't fully understand the impact on the mental health and well-being of children but we do expect there will have been an impact. So, we're working together with both health boards and our own knowledge and analytical services across the Government to both try to further understand what that is and the difference. Until we have more contact with families, we may not fully understand that, and that's a real point of concern for me. In all of the unknowns within this, the impact on mental health and well-being is absolutely one of them, because we're looking at how we then develop not just a recovery plan for the economy but a recovery plan around mental health, how we support people, and that will have to be informed by the understanding of what's happening when we get more engagement with families about the level of need, and then how we need to think about that. Obviously, it's a key factor for their return to school, but, actually, for the life children and young people lead outside the school environment, and that will be difficult because we're going to phase out of lockdown—it's not going to be a one-hit measure. That absolutely isn't going to happen. We're going to be looking at, at each point, what difference has been made, what more we can do. And, again, there are the efforts we're making to make sure that our online support services and our telephone support services—that we keep on reminding people that they're there and are available, and we want people to make use of them, because I know, as this committee said, we'd much rather be able to support people and intervene earlier rather than wait until there's a much bigger problem in a period of months in the future.
So, in reality, there's been no assessment undertaken because it's difficult to do that. So, the full picture in terms of the outcomes of the crisis—you don't know what they are at the moment as things stand.
We can't know, because we don't have that level of contact. There is a development—. I wouldn't say that no work's being done, but I couldn't tell you honestly that that work is finalised and we have a definitive understanding of the picture. If I tried to say that, then I'm sure you'd ask me, 'How on earth can you say that? If you're not having regular contact with people, you can't possibly understand the picture.' And it's much better to say, 'We don't understand the full picture. We know there'll have been an impact. We're working alongside health boards and others, but we'll know more as we carry on having more contact with families.' I'll look at a variety of different areas, again, both to reform the recovery plan, but also then to understand what we need to do at various points in the future, and the picture that we're seeing isn't straightforward and we need to make sure that we don't try to pretend to ourselves or to the public that there is a one-off measure that will allow us to be successful in all the areas that we'd want to be.