Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of provision of mental health support for 16 to 18 year olds.

We are committed to improving the mental health provision for 16-18-year olds. We are implementing the three core proposals in the green paper on children and young people’s mental health, which will incentivise all schools and colleges to identify and train a senior lead for mental health; create new school and college-based mental health support teams supervised by trained children and young people’s mental health staff; and pilot a four-week waiting time for access to specialist children and young people’s mental health services.

Under the NHS Long Term Plan, at least an additional 345,000 children and young people aged 0-25 years old will be able to access support via National Health Service-funded mental health services and school or college-based mental health support teams by 2023/24 and we will extend current service models to create a comprehensive offer for 0-25 year olds that reaches across mental health services for children, young people and adults.