Child mental health policy has a vital missing link
Ravi Chandiramani
Monday, August 31, 2015
Children's mental health is big news at the moment on three key fronts.
First, there is a growing prevalence of mental health problems among children and young people according to almost every report published. During August, the Children's Society's latest instalment of its Good Childhood Inquiry revealed children in England were unhappier with their school experience than all but one country surveyed.
Girlguiding's annual girls' attitudes survey, also released last month, revealed 62 per cent of girls aged 11 to 21 know a girl or young woman who has experienced a mental health issue. It also found fewer than half of 11- to 16-year-olds have talked about mental health during lessons at school. Earlier this year, Childline reported a 34 per cent surge in counselling sessions regarding mental health conditions in just 12 months.
Second, despite the growing prevalence, child and mental health services (CAMHS) budgets are shrinking.
Two-thirds of councils have either frozen or cut their CAMHS budgets every year since 2010, according to extensive research by the charity Young Minds.
As a result, the waiting times for children to be referred to CAMHS are lengthening across the country.
Third, the issue is (thankfully) high on the policy agenda - the government's Future in Mind five-year strategy sets out a plan to improve child mental health support at all levels of need, covering the full spectrum of professionals and services, from prevention right through to treatment of serious problems. One professional group, school nurses, is calling for improved training to address problems they spot in pupils. Aside from administering immunisations and drop-in clinics, school nurses are increasingly playing a pastoral care role but their training appears not to reflect the contemporary reality of their jobs.
Future in Mind does emphasise that schools have a crucial role in mental health. It urges local areas to involve schools when they soon submit their "local transformation plans" that will serve as a baseline audit of current needs and provision. It stresses that head teachers must deploy a "whole-school approach" in making pupil wellbeing part of the culture of a school so young people's problems are not allowed to go unnoticed and ignored. And the government has just appointed TV pundit and writer Natasha Devon as a mental health champion for schools.
Education Secretary Nicky Morgan appears to recognise that pupil wellbeing and academic achievement go hand to hand. Promoting buzzwords such as "character", "grit" and "resilience" can tend to over-simplify the issue, but this is an advance on the Govian evangelism that academic education alone can somehow transcend any social and emotional barrier to a child's ability to learn. As professionals located in children's day-to-day environment, school nurses as well as special educational needs co-ordinators, educational psychologists, school counsellors and indeed teaching staff are all well positioned to support children's wellbeing.
But the government's Future in Mind policy contains one glaring – and given all its other measures for schools to improve mental health, baffling – omission: to make PSHE compulsory in schools. To coin a favourite phrase of HM Treasury, such a measure would "fix the roof while the sun is shining" on children's mental health policy. Compulsory PSHE should be the the bedrock of efforts to ensure pupil wellbeing. Without it, so much hard work could go wasted.
Ravi Chandiramani is editor-in-chief of CYP Now. Derren Hayes is on holiday