Crisis in CAMHS? What crisis?

One of my compulsive habits is to take cuttings from the newspapers I read - I know this is a very 20th Century approach and that I should do everything online but I do find something curiously comforting about having the actual physical paper in front of me. (And I still can't makes notes on on-line articles as easily as I can on cuttings!)

One of my tallest piles for several months has been cuttings on child and adolescent mental health services and the crises of funding, of staffing, of waiting times, and of quality of care. This is both a national catastrophe - a tragedy for individuals and their families, and for society as a whole - and a great example for where early intervention pays long-term dividends in every way.

But there is at least one place in the UK where such a crisis just isn't happening, and I'm outraged.

Eton College is a charity - it was founded by King Henry VI as a charity school to provide free education to 70 poor boys who would then go on to King's College, Cambridge. Those were distant times, of course, and David Cameron was the 19th British Prime Minister to have attended Eton College, none of whom, so far as I can see, have counted as ‘poor'.

Eton College is advertising (The Guardian, 13 December) for an HCPC Registered Clinical Psychologist to join a team of clinical psychologists working under a Consultant Adolescent Psychiatrist. The team, together, deliver "evidence-based cognitive behavioural treatment" to 1,300 boys.

The ratio of qualified practitioners to children is so far in excess of what it is for the population as a whole that I find it simply incomprehensible and deeply repugnant. Added to that, the facts that boys attending Eton are very largely from wealthy families, and that there is a strong correlation between mental health and poverty, and the notion of a mental health ‘team' like this, even for a large school, is just obscene. (Remember that the boys also have access to the NHS.)

Eton College does have both a bursary scheme and some outreach work - and that's better than doing nothing, of course - but if this ‘charitable' work is a fig leaf protecting the enormous levels of privilege delivered by the college it's just that, a public relations fig leaf.

When I read this sort of story I start to feel like manning the barricades. Charitable status for independent schools is a bad joke and should be ended with immediate effect.

John Freeman is a children's services consultant and former DCS