CHILDREN as young as six are self-harming in Welsh schools, a study said yesterday, leading to union calls for wellbeing officers to be introduced in classrooms.

Referrals to social services by schools have risen sixfold in three years in one local authority area alone, according to the BBC research.

Pembrokeshire Council said there were 48 incidents in its schools in 2016-17 — an increase from just eight in 2014-15 — with the youngest pupil aged six years old, a freedom of information request showed. All were referred to social services.

But the broader picture is unclear as out of Wales’s 22 councils, only three provided responses to the request about the number of incidents in local authority schools.

Figures from children’s charity the NSPCC show that the number of young people who were hospitalised because of self-harm has risen by 41 per cent in Wales across a three-year period. In 2015-16, there were 350 more cases, a total of 1,193.

The NSPCC said self-harm takes “many forms” including cutting, burning, scratching, poisoning and overdosing.

The National Education Union (NEU) said that while some schools have dedicated wellbeing teams, others give the responsibility to a teacher.

NEU Cymru Wales policy officer Owen Hathway said that without in-school mental health specialists, some pupils “slip through the net.”

Wales is the only area of Britain where schools have a legal requirement to make counselling available for children older than year six, but the children’s commissioner for Wales said that was now “not enough.”

Professor Sally Holland said that therapists are also needed because teachers cannot be expected to undertake mental health work.

The government said that its education and health ministers had been in talks and that an announcement would be made “shortly.”

Recent research by teachers’ union NASUWT revealed 98 per cent of teachers knew of pupils in their school experiencing mental health problems, some as young as three and four years old.

But accessing expert external support for students was becoming increasingly difficult.

More than three-quarters of teachers told the union in a survey that they were not confident they would be able to get timely support from expert services such as the NHS’s child and adolescent mental health services.