Mental Health Support Teams: How to maximise the impact of the new workforce for children and young people

Abstract

Mental Health Support Teams were implemented with the aim of increasing mental health provision for children in schools. Ensuring the success of these teams requires the appropriate training, supervision and sustainability plan for the roles, and the ERG worked to produce a briefing paper outlining considerations we felt were important to enable to roles to be effective. The briefing also considered how to make the practitioner roles effective and sustainable. During the party conference session we focussed our political engagement on Children and Young People’s Mental Health with events on this topic at both Labour and Conservative party conferences. We officially launched our Mental Health Support Team (MHST) briefing at a Labour fringe panel event, attended by MPs, members of the ERG and Young Minds. As well as our own events, we engaged with policy makers and senior parliamentarians, including shadow education secretary Angela Rayner. All opportunities identified at conference have been followed up. Our MHST briefing was well received by external stakeholders, with the Central for Mental Health quoting our paper in Making the grade: How education shapes young people’s mental health. Additionally, colleagues at NHSE have made our briefing available on an online platform that will reach all of the MHST sites. However, it remains to be see how effects the MHSTs will become, particularly as the Government’s current target is only to cover 25 to 30 per cent of England.