£300m in mental health funding for school children. Is it enough?

The government has announced an extra £300m in mental health funding for school children (read more here). This comes after a report in October by the Care Quality Commission revealed young people in the UK were having to wait up to 18 months for mental health support, with 40% of service providers requiring improvement.

The money will go toward a number of new initiatives, including:
- training for designated mental health leads in schools to improve prevention work
- Earlier access to services through new Mental Health Support Team, working in and directly with schools
- New four week waiting time for NSH children and young people's mental health services to be piloted

However, some organisations have commented this funding is 'not enough' to make a significant change.

What do you think?

Do you think these extra measures could make a real difference for young people?

Did you experience mental health difficulties at school? What could have helped you?

What else needs to be done to better support young people's mental health?

Reply 1

shadowdweller

Volunteer Section Leader

I can't see it being enough when you think how much that will be scaled down once it's divided by the sheer number of schools.

Posted from TSR Mobile

Reply 2

doodle_333

Frankly it's hard to think what would be 'enough' as we could always do more and more and more. But right now we are so far away from even helping all the children in the most need, let alone the ones who are only struggling... I can't see this being much more than a drop in the ocean. The problem isn't just getting children help in 4 weeks but making sure there are resources to get ENOUGH help e.g. not a 6 week CBT course when they need months of proper therapy.

We had kids desperate for help in the school I worked at who were being passed from service to service because they couldn't go to CAHMS as they had a drug problem but their anxiety was too severe for the drugs service to cope with etc - no one wanted responsibility.

Schools also need SO much more training so they can stop being stuck between 1. teachers who feel all mental health is made up nonsense and kids should pull themselves togetehr and 2. teachers who want to do so much to help that they enable bad behaviours and let kids get away with stuff they shouldn't. People need to learn about mental health, learn how to spot signs, learn what to do and learn more about the effects of mental health and how to work with and challenge kids who are struggling.

I struggled with mental health at school and received fantastic help - both in school and at CAHMS. I had a brief period where my case worker left and I was transferred to another who was terrible but another member of staff in a group I took part in took over my case when I told her what was going on. I'm incredibly lucky because without accessing all that help so fast I would really have struggled to finish school at all.

The one thign which was lacking for me was that my teachers never picked up on my problems themselves. That was a shame because I probably needed help several years before I accessed it but I literally threatened to kill myself on a school trip and the teachers didn't even tell my parents. But I accept it's often hard to spot these things.

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 3

SWCoffee

Original post by eldorado888

All schools should be closed down.

Because **** the intellectual and mobile middle classes.

Reply 4

fallen_acorns

of course its not enough to solve the current crisis.

Its putting a small peice of tape over a crack thats getting larger and larger, without actually doing anything about why its getting larger...

If you want to reduce mental health problems in children, my advice would be:

- Less academic pressure and testing
But
- Increased daily discipline and strict teaching within schools

- Less freedom with technology, especially social media
But
- Massively more freedom to play outside, especially imaginary and rough play with other kids

And most of all:

- Encourage closer and bigger families, where kids grow up with a whole family community.. not just 1 child and mum+dad. Or even two children, but 3 children, with mum and dad and grandparents very close by, with 5 cousins in the same area and 4 aunts and 5 uncles..

---

At the moment you have kids growing up in family structures that are not optimal at all for their mental well-being, and do not give them the support they need... then going to schools which do not teach the discipline and self-control required to tackle the complicated modern world, and instead match an incredibly relaxed daily environment with incredibly harsh testing... then you have less and less kids learning to socialize properly through play because parents are to afraid to let their kids outside, and would rather little Oliver played video games then went out and fell out of a tree with a group of lads from down the road.

More money for mental health provision is good.. its needed, because right now we are sending our children and teenagers into a world that will absolutely cause many of them to develop mental health concerns, and we are doing very little about changing that world. (Typed on the same week as Facebook announced their new app for 6 year olds...)

Reply 5

username1148663

More money is good but we need much better treatments when someone gets to see someone psychological research is poor for solving the most common problems