Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve access to child and adolescent mental health services for schools and families.

We are making an additional £1.4 billion available over the course of 2015/16-2020/21. This money will transform services and increase access to specialist mental health services for an additional 70,000 children and young people a year by 2020/21.

Specifically on improving access to mental health support for schools: with the Department for Education, we are setting up new Mental Health Support Teams, as announced in our joint Green Paper. These teams will deliver mental health interventions for those with mild to moderate needs in or close to schools and colleges (and refer those with more severe needs on to specialist services). The Green Paper also announced the piloting of a four week waiting time to improve access to National Health Service mental health services, which we will roll out in a number of trailblazer areas alongside the support teams. The Department for Education is also setting up new training to incentivise schools and colleges to train a Designated Senior Lead for Mental Health to promote a whole-school approach to mental health and work closely with the new Support Teams.

We will also ensure that at least one teacher in every primary and secondary school will receive mental health awareness training to enable school staff to spot common signs of mental health issues, and to help children and young people receive appropriate support.

We have also introduced two waiting time standards for children and young people. The first aims for 95% of children (up to 19 years old) with eating disorders to receive treatment within a week for urgent cases and four weeks for routine cases. The second is that 50% of patients of all ages experiencing a first episode of psychosis receive treatment within two weeks of referral. We are currently exceeding or on track to meet these waiting time standards.