Stockport 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.

We provide evidence based psychological interventions to children and young people from the age of four till 18. The focus of our work is “Early Intervention”  for those suffering from mild to moderate mental health difficulties. We operate within Getting Advice and Getting Help of the THRIVE Model.

We deliver three core functions:

  1. Evidence based psychological interventions for mild to moderate mental health issues. This is delivered either 1:1 or in a group setting. The interventions include behaviour activation for low mood and worry management for anxiety.
  2. Whole School and College Approach which includes delivering workshops for the young people as well as staff training.
  3. Signposting to other organisations for those we are unable to work with. Giving timely advise to the mental health leads in schools.

In each of our schools the practitioners have completed several whole school and college approach activities which include exam stress workshops, transition workshops, sleep hygiene, emotional regulation and five ways to wellbeing workshops. For the staff our workshops have included how to identify mental health needs, staff wellbeing workshops. We delivered several workshops during Children’s Mental Health Week in February.

We work in partnership with a VCSE partner and Stockport Local Authority to deliver the mental health support in Stockport.

School  Coverage

As of April 25 operate in 27 schools: 16 Primary, 10 Secondary and one college. We have recently taken on seven schools as part of our mobilisation. These comprise four primary and 3 Secondary. The clinicians have been allocated and they will be spending the initial phase on completion of Asset Based Documents and Memorandum of Understanding. We aim to continue the mobilisation by taking on up to 25 schools over the next couple of months and 100% of schools over coming years.