Pupils at nearly three-quarters of primary schools will not have access to mental health support teams by the end of 2024, new data suggests.
And students at just under half of secondary schools will not have access to the support by the end of the same period.
Data from each NHS Integrated Care Board (ICB) in England, obtained through a freedom of information request by the Liberal Democrats, shows that just 53.5 per cent of secondary schools and 26.6 per cent of primary schools will be served by mental health support teams (MHSTs) by the end of 2024.
The investigation comes after Tes revealed that MHSTs were struggling to retain staff due to the “emotional intensity” of the job, high workload and frustration with the approach and scope of the work.
MHSTs were launched to support pupils in primary, secondary and further education by then mental health minister Gillian Keegan, now education secretary, in a joint Department of Health and Department for Education response to the 2017 children and young people’s mental health Green Paper.
The Liberal Democrats asked 42 ICBs for the details of every MHST that operates in their area or that will be operational by the end of 2024, as well as the number of schools or pupils it serves.
Some 31 ICBs out of the 42 provided data in response to the FOI request.
The data reveals that the Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and West Berkshire ICB has the slowest rollout, with its existing or planned teams covering just one in five secondary schools and one in 10 primaries.
And spending per pupil on MHSTs varies hugely by ICB, with the most being spent in the Surrey Heartlands (£87, compared with just £24 in the North East and North Cumbria).
Doubts about funding for school mental health teams
At the end of last year the NHS revealed that 18 per cent of seven- to 16-year-olds had a probable mental disorder in 2022.
The MHST programme has not been guaranteed funding beyond 2024, but Ms Keegan has said that the DfE will ”certainly be putting the case forward for continuing the rollout of this successful programme”.
Health chiefs have said that, without any further funding, they could use the existing NHS budget to fund the teams for an extra year. However, they could not guarantee how the teams will fare in the next government Spending Review.
Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Munira Wilson MP claimed that the government was ”letting down our children and young people”.
“Our children’s mental health services were in crisis before the pandemic, but Conservative ministers have failed completely to grasp the scale of the tidal wave in mental ill-health that has emerged since,” she said.
“Under the Tories, a school that sees an NHS mental health professional for a day a week is one of the lucky ones. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of children are left waiting to see if mental health support will be rolled out at their school or sacrificed to pay for the government’s economic incompetence. Yet failing to roll out the programme will simply make waiting times for acute child and adolescent mental health services even worse.
“Liberal Democrats would invest in our children by putting a qualified mental health professional in every school so that more young people come to school happy, healthy and ready to learn.”
A government spokesperson said: “Mental health support teams are ahead of schedule in their rollout, and now cover 35 per cent of pupils and learners, having met our ambition of 25 per cent in April 2022, a year earlier than planned.
“These teams are just one way of supporting school children’s mental health, on top of our investment of £2.3 billion a year by 2024 into mental health services, meaning an additional 345,000 children and young people will be able to access the NHS-funded mental health support they need.”
The Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care have been contacted for comment.