Targeted youth support: redesigning services - bringing health and educational psychology to provide holistic support

Issue

Hard data from Knowsley's targeted youth support (TYS) pathfinder strongly supported an existing awareness in the authority that services supporting mental and emotional health were fragmented. A number of services were providing support to young people, but each was working in isolation.

Background

The central area partnership, one of the three area partnerships in Knowsley, had identified mental health services as a priority for improvement and the local child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) service had set 16-18 provision as a priority target.

The principal educational psychologist had mapped available services and identified a lack of coordination and shared vision.

In response, healthy schools, educational psychology, CAHMS and the social and emotional aspects of learning team worked together to develop a shared vision to inform the local mental health strategy.

Actions prompted by TYS

One of the critical issues identified by the TYS process was the need to develop working partnerships between involved services to ensure support for young people is as holistic and effective as possible.

A TYS workstream team was set up to explore risk and resilience factors that lead to or protect young people from negative outcomes. It included representatives from a wide range of services, including CAMHS, Connexions, housing and youth and play services.

At an early stage in the team's operation, a CAMHS representative identified the absence of educational psychology services in the team as well as the potential to link the team's work with the existing work that was being carried out in the authority around mental toughness. As a result the principal educational psychologist in the authority was brought in to project manage the team.

The team identified five strands of work underpinning the issue of ensuring support for young people is as holistic as possible: transition, mental toughness of individuals, mental health awareness and health promotion, support for parents and families and working with the hard to reach.

Benefits and results

While still work in progress, the TYS workstream team is beginning to formulate solutions and, simply by having a wide variety of agencies working together to address issues, is illustrating the effectiveness of a multi-agency targeted youth support approach.

An important strand of the team's work is participating in a research project on mental toughness, run by Hull University. The university is using questionnaires to measure factors such as work ethic, self belief and self esteem among young people. The results of this research will show whether these factors link to negative behaviours.

We have worked hard to get the membership and leadership of our teams right and ensure we have people in place able to continue to make mental health and wellbeing an integral part of their work and so make our solutions effective and sustainable.

Steve Clarke, principal educational psychologist

In addition, the team is looking at parenting packages and how best to support families under stress. Hard to reach families are an issue, but the TYS change process discovered that hard to reach services are also a major problem. For example, many services are only available between 9am and 5pm and a number take people off their lists if they miss an appointment. The TYS team is looking at how to make these services more accessible for families and young people.

Another way the Knowsley TYS team is working to ensure comprehensive support for young people is by training service professionals such as health visitors and school nurses to train universal service staff on mental health promotion and the early identification of problems.

The original mental health strategy team is also working with the broader range of staff in the TYS workstream to focus on the transitions from primary to secondary school and secondary school into work. The team has identified other agencies and individuals that need to be involved and is currently looking at developing commissioning proposals for improved services to support young people in transition.

The local authority

Knowsley is an urban unitary authority with areas of high deprivation. The TYS pathfinder is focused on a small and stable working class area. Knowsley's statistical neighbours (DfES measures) include Liverpool, Salford, Middlesbrough, Kingston Upon Hull, Hartlepool, Nottingham, Sandwell, Wolverhampton, Rochdale and Walsall.

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