Supporting Mental Health

We will encourage involvement in available incentives (e.g. Quality Premium) and new incentives to increase access to services for underrepresented groups. We intend to further develop the support available to parents by exploring the development of a whole school approach to prevention and early intervention, along with building community capacity.

We are working with our partners in Northamptonshire County Council to improve the emotional health and wellbeing service available to Care Leavers. We plan to explore how to provide additional resource to the existing specialist LAC Mental Health Team in order to meet the mental health needs of this vulnerable group. This will include plans to train a number of staff across the system in the “Incredible Years” model to support earlier intervention and help keep CYP in education and within their families and local communities. We also plan to invest in more specialist training such as Systemic Family Therapy to reduce family breakdown, increase resilience and prevent un necessary hospital admissions.

Care Leavers aged 18-25 often have a high level of emotional needs, which interferes with their ability to access education or employment and healthy relationships, but do not have a diagnosed mental health condition and do not meet the criteria for adult mental health services. In order to measure the outcomes at all levels (CYP, families, services and the local population), our intention is to embed goal-based outcome measures, across a range of services and settings. This will promote collaborative working between professionals and service-users towards shared-goals.

We recognised there was a local gap in supporting the emotional wellbeing needs of our young offenders, who were at increased risk of entering the secure estate. We have secured funding to assist in the delivery of key outcomes in the Health and Justice Collaborative Commissioning workstream. This funding is intended to improve and develop the following pathways for vulnerable children and young people and to impact positively and the 18 KPI’s linked to this workstream. We intend to recruit dedicated staff, based within CAMHS and YOS (one support worker in each team), providing specialist outreach support to young people with emotional wellbeing needs and impacted functioning, who have committed an offence and are at risk of entering the secure estate in the future. The staff would work with these young people in order to reduce the likelihood of re-offending and entering the secure estate.