Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the number of additional (a) child and adolescent psychiatrists, (b) psychotherapists and (c) mental health nurses that will be required to deliver school-based mental health support teams throughout England.

We are setting up new Mental Health Support Teams to deliver mental health interventions for those with mild to moderate needs in or close to schools and colleges, referring those with more severe needs on to specialist services. The teams will support and join up with existing professionals such as educational psychologists, school nurses and health visitors. We expect the teams to comprise a mix of more junior and more senior staff; there will be funding available to support the teams and will also support the cost of supervision from qualified staff in National Health Service children’s mental health services. There will also be a new role, Educational Mental Health Practitioner, with the recruitment for this role currently underway and 210 places available across the country.

There are no ready-made answers about the overall make-up of teams and how they should operate, and we are clear that we do not want to impose a model that does not take account of the existing local context. It will therefore be important to design national roll-out on the basis of the experience from the trailblazer programme. The trailblazer sites will be announced shortly.