Northpoint Wellbeing is a charity and an NHS commissioned provider of mental health and emotional wellbeing support to children, young people and adults across the Yorkshire region. Their main services for children and young people are Calderdale Open Minds, two Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) in Calderdale and the Leeds Schools Service, known as Leeds Mindmate Wellbeing, which Helen oversees.
Helen McGlinchey, Northpoint Wellbeing’s Head of Service and Clinical Lead for the schools service spoke with us to discuss best practices for providing great mental health support in schools for children and young people.
Read on to see top tips for setting up effective mental health support for children and young people in education settings.
1. Build relationships with key members of staff in schools
A key element for Northpoint Wellbeing services has always been building relationships. More specifically, establishing those relationships with key staff members within schools. Those staff members are likely to be Heads of Service, Pastoral Leads, Designated Safeguarding Leads and key staff on reception.
Schools provide such a helpful overview of those children, young people and families who need mental health support.
2. Establish a clear service model and clear referral pathways
Northpoint works in a multi-agency way, which is fundamental to their service offer. They have clear frameworks and procedures to support the service offer, but also understand that they need to adapt to changing circumstances.
Over the years, they have really developed our service model to respond to the needs of the children and young people. School staff are under more pressure than ever to respond to the mental health and emotional wellbeing needs of their pupils.
In terms of referral pathways, either the school will identify the mental health or emotional wellbeing of that child or young person, or the young person or parent may approach the school themselves. If it is deemed that therapeutic support would be the most helpful option, the referral would come into the service from there.
3. Ensure good communication between services
It’s important to be able to direct children, young people and their families to the right kind of mental health support in schools. Therefore, communication between services is key.
For example, if we receive a referral that we know is on a waiting list for a specialist NHS mental health team, we would link up with the duty clinicians in the team. It may then be agreed, between the services, that a bridging offer of support can be offered through our service, while the child or young person is waiting to be assessed by the specialist team.
4. Develop and diversify your service offer
Continuing to develop and diversify your service offer is key to delivering effective support to children and young people.
It is so important for services to consider the different ways in which they can engage with children and young people in education settings. Services need to be able to meet rising demands and to respond to children and young people’s needs in the best way possible.
5. Establish robust policies and procedures
Having really robust and clear policies and procedures in place is fundamental for our therapists to offer great mental health support in schools. Especially in response to safeguarding and clinical risk.
Our services provide early intervention, but that certainly doesn’t mean we don’t receive complex referrals. Having a clear framework and a really robust set of clinical policies and procedures is key to supporting the service model, the team and the offer to children and young people.
6. Embed a patient management system that supports data reporting
We started working with Mayden and their iaptus CYP software. We were confident that it would be a successful system for us to use as a NHS commissioned provider. It was a real shift. Prior to that, within the clusters and schools, a lot of people were still using paper records. They were also using some electronic systems but nothing of the scale or nature of a patient management system.
It has really helped us as a service in terms of having everything in one place, with data protection and being able to develop our care pathways to really suit our service.
The key was to successfully submit that data for national NHS reporting. We have on average about 4,500 and 5000 data submissions per month. We rarely have any rejections from our monthly submissions, and if we do receive any, we work closely with Mayden to iron those out. It’s been a significant transition for us but a really good one.
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