Charities get aid to boost child mental health

Half of all lifetime mental ill health is diagnosable by the age of 14, and three quarters by the time a young person reaches their mid-20s.

Despite this, child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) are notoriously overstretched – predominantly dealing with children at the higher end of need.

In a bid to increase the availability of early intervention mental health services, the government is funding a £3m scheme to support the voluntary sector to run mental health services in schools and elsewhere.

The initiative is being managed by a group called the Bond (better outcomes, new delivery) consortium, led by youth charity YoungMinds.

Sarah Brennan, the charity’s chief executive, says the programme will bring schools, CAMHS and voluntary sector providers together, so that they can share insights into how best to commission and to get commissioned.

Voluntary group input
Brennan hopes that the initiative will result in more work for voluntary groups, better support for children when emotional problems first appear and, ultimately, better attainment at school and fewer young people entering upper-tier CAMHS.

“I’ve been working in the voluntary sector for years and I’ve seen many capacity building projects come and go, often with no lasting impact,” she says. “All of us in Bond wanted this one to be different.”

The consortium plans to run five local pilots to test ways of improving the voluntary sector’s ability to win contracts to run services. The group will then deliver a national training programme based on the lessons learned from the pilots.

The first pilot kicked off in April in Tees Valley, where it is estimated that at least 14,000 children and young people suffer from a diagnosable mental health problem, equating to three children in every classroom.

Regular workshops are the focus of Bond’s Tees Valley work and, says Brennan, one goal of these is to clear the fog surrounding commissioning and different terminology used in different parts of the sector.

“It’s about understanding each other,” she says. “In the last workshop, we went through the difference between mental health problems, mental illness and so on. For everybody except the CAMHS commissioners that was an ‘oh that’s the difference’ moment.”

Tina Jackson is director of the Link Partnership, which exists to aid joint working between voluntary and statutory organisations dealing with young people’s mental health in Redcar and Cleveland.

She says the Bond consortium’s work is helping charities overcome barriers to working in schools and other children’s services settings, such as how to make services sustainable and modify provision to local needs. The workshops have given participants “practical things to learn”, she explains, “stuff about how you work out your costings, for example.”

Richenda Broad, assistant director, children’s trust and performance, at Middlesbrough Council, claims this kind of support and advice is proving vital to schools, which are new to the field of commissioning.

“Schools will have been part of the commissioning process in the past, but now they are expected to take the initiative and just as local authorities gained skills and confidence over time in commissioning, schools now have to do the same,” she explains.

Neil Appleby, head teacher of Rye Hills School in Redcar, says that working with Bond has educated him about the range of support services that schools can access to support their pupils.

“Head teachers are very aware that there is significant provision out there for mental health services but we’re not sure where they are,” he says. “Having been to the workshops I’ve seen that there are high-quality organisations out there that I never knew about.”

Quality assurance
Knowing what exists is one thing; distinguishing between the good and the not so good is another. To help with this, Bond is developing a quality assurance checklist, which the Tees Valley pilot will put to the test next month.

The ultimate test though is whether this translates into new early intervention services.

“If no contracts or work or opportunities come our way then, sadly, this will have been a waste of resource,” says Lawrence McAnelly, chief executive of local youth support and counselling charity, The Junction. “I think our glass is half-full, but ask me in six months’ time.”

But Mark Davis, strategic development manager at Middlesbrough Voluntary Development Agency, believes the pilot will boost the local voluntary and community sector and has real potential to meet the specific needs of local young people.
“Past commissioning-support programmes have been pretty much focused on commissioning full stop and not understanding need,” he says. “This is tailored to our local needs.”


How the bond consortium aims to improve mental health services