The importance of early intervention and supporting children and young people (CYP) in schools has been coming up the agenda over the last 10 years.
As part of the “Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision: a Green Paper”, published in 2017, there was a vision for children and young people to have better mental health and wellbeing support, promoted in schools and colleges by parents, carers and health and care providers.
To support this, the NHS long term plan committed to establishing Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) in 20-25% of the country by 2023.
Initially, 58 MHSTs were established in 25 Trailblazer areas around the country. There are now more than 400 teams working in schools and colleges with the aim to reach 500 MHSTs by April 2024. These schools are attended by almost three million young people; although, still a very small proportion of our national population of CYP.
Children and Young People’s Mental Health: The Path to Recovery
Mayden recently sponsored Open Forum’s CYP Mental Health: The Path to Recovery conference in Manchester to explore how mental health service providers can be better equipped to provide the necessary support to such a high number of children and young people struggling with their mental health.
Our digital care record software, iaptus CYP, was created to help CYP mental health services to manage the psychological therapy support they offer and improve outcomes for patients. We work hard to ensure that the system is flexible, can be configured to different care pathways and evidences the work that MHSTs are doing. We also make sure that services can collect data in line with what NHS England is collecting nationally, and, most importantly, to help them to improve what they do and really understand the challenges they are facing.
We invited Dr. Jo Ellins, Senior Fellow at the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham, to present the key findings from NIHR BRACE’s evaluation of “Early Experiences of Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) in Schools and Colleges“.
NIHR BRACE’s evaluation of “Early Experiences of Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) in Schools and Colleges"
Led by Dr. Jo Ellins, NIHR BRACE’s evaluation of MHSTs draws out key findings and lessons for future programme implementation and expansion.
The evaluation was carried out by two units funded by the National Institute of Health and Care research, the BRACE Rapid Evaluation Centre, of which Dr. Jo is Deputy Director, and the Policy Innovation and Evaluation Research Unit. Elements of this study have been co-produced and led by young people with lived experience of mental health issues.
The report found that:
- Good progress has been made in implementing MHSTs, despite challenging circumstances.
- MHSTs spent more time providing direct support (on average 52% of their time) than on their other two functions (24% on whole school support and 23% on giving advice and liaising with external services).
- Recruiting to the Education Mental Health Practitioner (EMHP) role and training programme had gone well, but Trailblazers consistently reported problems retaining EMHPs once in post.
- Education settings reported positive effects from participating in the programme, including staff feeling more confident talking to children and young people about mental health and wellbeing issues.
- 70% of Senior mental health leads in schools and colleges said that the MHST is becoming an established and connected part of their setting.
Want to know more?
Want to find out more about the evaluation of MHST trailblazer sites? We’ll be joined by Jenny Newbould from the BRACE team as guest speaker at one of our “sharing and learning” webinars for MHSTs on 23rd May – sign up today.
