The DHSC has announced plans to introduce thousands of new mental health workers who will work in or near schools and colleges.
‘Our proposals are genuinely transformational and will take time to roll-out in a meaningful and useful way. Our estimates suggest that at full roll-out, the brand new Mental Health Support Teams could comprise up to 8,000 new staff. This is comparable in size to the entire current children and young people’s mental health services workforce in the NHS.
We will need to recruit and train a cadre of new staff to form the teams, which will take time. With over 20,000 schools and colleges, roll-out to a fifth to a quarter of the country by 2022/23 will in itself be a significant achievement’.
The government state that £300 million will be made available to support the proposals, representing a major addition to the existing extensive programme around children and young people’s mental health.