Publish date: 31 October 2023
Meet the Ealing Mental Health Support Team (MHST), part of the Children Adolescent Mental Health Services at the Trust. The team are a key part of the early intervention mental health support offer for Children and Young People in schools across Ealing. In their own words they wanted to offer insights into the work they do.
What does the Mental Health Support Team do?
Mental Health Support Teams offer evidence-based early intervention support for children and young people with mild-to-moderate mental health needs within mainstream schools. The Ealing Mental Health Support Team was founded at the beginning of 2020 and has since been supporting the families of children attending schools in Ealing in a variety of ways. Our service is schools based and we have practitioners in a large number of primary and almost all secondary schools within the area. The practitioners work together with link workers in participating schools to identify and support children and young people who present with low to moderate anxiety and behavioural problems in primary schools, and anxiety and low mood symptoms in secondary schools.
In Primary schools, the support is parent led and in the form of 6 to 8 online or in person 1 to 1 sessions of Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) based guided self-help. In secondary schools the wellbeing practitioners work directly with the young person and the sessions are in person at the school.
We also offer a range of groups, classroom interventions, workshops, wellbeing assemblies, coffee mornings, staff training and other interventions, and tend to work collaboratively with our schools to help to identify gaps and opportunities to support a Whole School Approach to mental health within the school.
Parents of children from any Ealing School can currently sign up to and access our twice monthly parent workshops online. Our MHST also has a learning disability and autism strand, called MHST+ Learning Disabilities and Autism Practitioners, which offers a range of interventions with the child/young person, parent and school staff members.
The team also have other limited offers within the team that are currently at pilot phase, including Lumi Nova (a digital CBT-informed app for 7-12 year olds with mild-to-moderate anxiety) and short term CBT-informed Art therapy (currently piloted in 4 schools).
What are the specialisms within the team?
The majority of the team are made up of Education Mental Health Practitioners and Child Wellbeing Practitioners, who are trained up to deliver the core guided self-help interventions in schools. Some of these have moved into dual supervisory practitioner roles. We have strong links with university courses and tend to have trainees in the team completing their training programmes to deliver evidence-based mental health interventions in schools.
We have one Senior Wellbeing Practitioner in the team, who is trained to deliver mild-to-moderate interventions for other presentations, such as OCD, Tics/Tourette’s, low mood/anxiety with self-harm, trauma and neurodiversity.
We have Learning Disability and Autism Practitioners, that offer tailored evidence-based interventions in mainstream schools for children and young people with autism and/or learning disabilities, who also have a mild-to-moderate mental health presentation (low mood, anxiety and challenging behaviour).
The MHST leads are made up of a family therapist, art therapist, and a mental health nurse who is completing a training programme to become a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist.
Our MHST manager is a Clinical Psychologist by background. The senior staff within the team bring their professional expertise into the leadership and supervision of staff, supporting them to broaden their thinking beyond the remit of their training course.
Where is the team based?
We are based at Ealing CAMHS, Armstrong Way. Although the team tend to base themselves in schools for a majority of their time.
How can Children and Young People access the support offered by the team?
We receive referrals from schools, however, we also engage in interventions to try to encourage children/young people and parents to come forward to seek out support.
For example, we offer mental health awareness assemblies and parent coffee mornings, to raise awareness about the service and have further plans for raising more awareness, to enable children/young people and parents to seek out appropriate support from the school.
Ealing Mental Health Support Team outreach in schools across North West London
What are the challenges the team experience and what do you think could be done to mitigate them?
School systems are incredibly stressed and stretched, and this stress is likely felt and taken on by our staff members, who line work in the schools There are also differences in how schools respond to the service., with some making really good use of the service, and others perhaps being harder-to-reach. We make a lot of efforts to be flexible and to try to identify barriers for access and solutions for moving forward, but due to the pressures that exist for schools, it is not always easy for them to respond to communications, to recommendations or to make referrals into the service.
We have also noticed that it can be a challenge for some schools to identify those children and young people who need our support the most, because their problems are mild-to-moderate and not always obvious to the school staff. It is only when their needs become more entrenched and complex that they are noticed.
Schools are also incredibly fast-paced systems, and force the team to work in a fast-paced way, putting all sorts of pressures on the team. The team have incredibly high admin loads and are also working with multiple school systems and there isn’t always that understanding of how much admin is involved in offering this type of work in schools. The service is valued by our clients and there is an increased demand that outweighs our resources. However, there are not enough practitioners trained to fill in vacancies when we need to recruit to new posts or replace practitioners that have left the service.
These challenges enable us to always plan and think about new ways of working and addressing them. We are a team that is willing to share our learning and to develop based to feedback. We meet on a half termly basis as a team, to identify gaps and ways to move forward as a team.
The team are offering workshops for parents in Ealing throughout Autumn and early Winter.
To sign up simply scan the QR code or click here to register.
