Bury Mental Health Support Team

Mental health support teams were introduced as part of a nationally programmed expansion in Children and Young People’s mental health services set out in the Green Paper: Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision (2017).[1] The central purpose of mental health support teams, as set out in national policy, is to provide specific extra capacity for early intervention and ongoing help, with three specified functions:

  1. Function 1: providing direct support to children and young people with mild to moderate mental health issues;
  2. Function 2: supporting educational settings (specifically the senior mental health lead in that setting – where established) to introduce or develop their whole school or college approach to mental health and wellbeing;
  3. Function 3: giving advice to staff in educational settings and liaising with external specialist services to help children and young people to get the right support and stay in education.

Our mental health support team is focussed on early intervention and prevention work. We support children and young people at school and college, who are experiencing mental health difficulties such as anxiety and low mood. This includes: 

  • One to one and group therapy/skills sessions for children and parent/carers  
  • Advice or signposting to other services 
  • Support schools and colleges around their wellbeing for pupils and staff 

The current workshops available to mental health support team schools includes: 

Children and young people 

  • Introduction to the mental health support team  
  • Transitions workshop (year 6 or year 11 students) 
  • Exam stress management workshop 
  • 5 ways to wellbeing workshop  
  • Worry management workshop  
  • Low mood psychoeducation session for young people (secondary) 

Parents/carers & professionals  

  • Introduction to the mental health support team
  • Supporting wellbeing through exams  
  • Supporting children with transitions (aimed at parents/professionals supporting year 6 students) 
  • Understanding low mood and depression  
  • Understanding anxiety  
  • Supporting 5 ways to wellbeing  
  • Triple P seminars (x3 90-minute seminars) 
  • The power of positive parenting  
  • Raising confident and competent children  
  • Raising resilient children  
  • Staff wellbeing for education staff 

Our mission is to help children and young people reach their full potential by offering the right support, in the right place, at the right time. We take a joined-up approach, based on each person’s individual needs and our goal is to help them thrive in education and beyond, so they can reach their full potential. 

Currently, the Bury mental health support team is available in 26 education settings. For a complete list, please visit our website: 

We have five education settings left to mobilise from those originally identified, We are hoping to be available in these settings by the end of this academic year. Following this we plan to expand our support to more high schools by offering workshops that promote a whole-school approach to helping children thrive. 

Since being operational the team have: 

  • Reached over 17,000 pupils, parents/carers or school staff via whole school approach work (e.g workshops, assemblies, mental health & wellbeing events and other).  
  • 588 children, young people or their parents have received individual evidence-based interventions from the team 
  • 98% rated their experience of Bury mental health support team as good or very good  

To support all Bury schools to introduce or develop their whole school or college approach, we have appointed a fixed-term whole education approach coordinator and have collaborated with the Salford educational psychology service to deliver the emotionally friendly settings  programme. The coordinator’s focus is predominantly on non mental health support teams schools and also offers the following: 

  • Termly network meetings for senior mental health leaders 
  • ½ termly newsletter updates 
  • Termly ‘Train the Trainer- style’ Information sharing sessions for school staffs  
  • Support, advice and signposting around the whole school and college approach to schools 
  • Information sharing sessions for Trustees/Governors around emotionally friendly settings