Trafford Thrive in Education 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.

At Trafford our team works within most secondary schools but all schools can contact us for advice (school and college advice line: scil@mft.nhs.uk)

Our partner mental health support team service Place2Be work within primary schools and we work alongside them.  We work closely with our educational psychology colleagues, supporting our senior mental health leads and how they work within their schools.

Our mental health support team has three main core functions:

  1. Delivering evidence-based interventions for children and young people with mild-to-moderate mental health problems. This includes support for things like mild-moderate anxiety or worries, exam stress and friendship issues through 6-8 sessions of low intensity cognitive behavioural therapy, themed group work or information workshops.
  2. Supporting the senior mental health lead in each education setting to introduce, develop and support in the delivery of their whole school/college approach
  3. Giving timely advice to school and college staff, and liaising with external specialist services, to help children and young people to get the right support and stay in education using regular consultation slots with your senior mental health lead/pastoral team

We also support the transition between primary to secondary schools.  If we feel that more support is required than we can offer, we will help signpost the school/family to the right service or partner agency to help. This may be from Trafford Talk Shop, Trafford First Response, Trafford Team Together, Core-CAMHS or our other CAMHS services.

Assessments and interventions with young people and families to understand more about their difficulties. These are usually on a 1:1 basis and cognitive behavioural therapy informed.  We are developing our group work offer and may feel this would be a more helpful intervention to offer.  We would always discuss this with you first. We also offer psychoeducation sessions to help young people and families understand more about mental health. We usually complete therapeutic sessions for our young people in their education setting as we are a school-based service.