The Education and Health and Social Care Select Committees published their response to the government’s proposals to roll out mental health provision in schools. In a document titled ‘The Government’s Green Paper on mental Health in Schools: Failing a Generation’, the government’s plans are described as ‘lacking ambition’ and ‘providing no help to the majority of those children who desperately need it’.
On the relationship of the proposals for schools to CAMHS, the report states:
“80. Stakeholders have highlighted existing staff shortages within CAMHS. They raised concerns that these shortages might not only impede implementation of the Green Paper proposals, but that attempts to deliver these proposals given current workforce pressures may jeopardise the care of children and young people with the most severe needs.”
The ACP’s response to the Green paper is quoted:
“109. NHS Providers told us of the “fractured national and local commissioning structures”, and the clear need for better integration of education and health services, since “academies can opt out of local CAMHS arrangements”. The Association of Child Psychotherapists told us that: There is also an assumption that the kind of inter-agency and cross-organisational collaboration and joint working envisioned is unproblematic when all experience of such work is that it is fraught with operational challenges and complex dynamics.
The reports recommends:
“82. …that Health Education England set out how they will address the questions raised about the impact of the Green Paper’s proposals on the entire CAMHS workforce in its upcoming workforce strategy, due for publication in July 2018.”