Schools: Mental Health Services

(asked on 20th February 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what his plans are for the operation of the new New Mental Health Support Teams; and whether he has set a provisional date for (a) all pupils having access to those teams at their school, (b) publication of an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of those teams and (c) those teams being put on a statutory footing.


Answered by
Maria Caulfield Portrait
Maria Caulfield
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
This question was answered on 28th February 2023

We have no current plans to put mental health support teams on a statutory footing, and we have not set a date for all pupils across England to have access to mental health support teams. While funding beyond 2024/25 is subject to future spending reviews, we will consider options for the scale and speed out of options beyond that point.

We met our commitment to deploy mental health support teams to 20 to 25% of the country by 2022/23 a year early, with 287 teams in operation covering 26% of the country as of spring 2022. This will increase to 399 teams, covering around 35% of pupils, by April 2023 with over 500 planned to be up and running by 2024. Details of the mental health support team site selection process and rollout is available at the following link:

www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/cyp/trailblazers

An independent early evaluation of the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Trailblazer programme was published in January and is available at the following link:

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/brace/projects/children-and-young-people's-mental-health-trailblazer-programme.aspx

The evaluation examines the development, implementation, and early progress of the first wave of mental health support teams in the first 25 “trailblazer” areas participating in the programme, which became operational from January 2020.

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