Schools and teachers are “buckling under pressure” to support the growing number of school-age children who develop mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, experts say.
Despite being the people students most often turn to when in distress, teachers are hampered in their desire to help by the profession’s pervasive lack of training in dealing with mental illness.
The huge barriers many families in England face in getting help for their son or daughter from the NHS’s child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) are putting pressure on schools, according to a group of experts in education and health writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. .
“Currently, the health sector is not meeting the growing health needs of children. Schools and teachers provide vital support, but are buckling under the pressure of the demands placed on them,” he says.
“The mental health of children and young people in England, and the services designed to support them, are in a dire state,” they add. While rates of mental illness in those under 18 have halved in the last three years, “the provision is not enough to meet the needs.”
Only one in four of the 500,000 children and youth referred to CAMHS each year receive help as services are stretched, and many are denied care because they are deemed not sick enough.
The authors include Chloe Lowry of the UCL Institute of Education in London, Lisa-Maria Müller and Alison Peacock of the Chartered College of teaching and Anant Jani of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Schools should receive NHS funding to help them train teachers to meet the growing need, she argues.
Teachers’ detailed knowledge and regular interaction with their students means they are “not just the first port of call when concerns arise, but for many the only port of call.” Children and young people seek help from them more often than from their own family, surveys show. Teachers are considered, along with GPs and social workers, to be part of the first level of support at CAMHS.
“It is therefore surprising and alarming that teachers in England are not adequately trained for these roles,” the authors write. Only one school teacher in England receives mental health awareness training.
Despite being CAMHS Level 1 professionals, only 40% of classroom teachers felt equipped to teach children in their class with mental health needs and only 32% knew of organizations outside of the school that could help to students, according to a government report in 2016.
“While schools and colleges do all they can for students, it remains true that the lack of support and provision of mental health services for children and young people has been an ongoing problem for many years,” said Dr. Mary Bousted, Joint CEO. secretary of the NEU, the main teachers’ union. Covid has made the situation worse, she added.
“The workload, the lack of outside support, the inadequate number of staff to work on pastoral issues and training are huge barriers to students getting the support they need and should expect.”
Dr. Nihara Krause, a consultant clinical psychologist, said teachers need to have specialist mental health services they can refer students to because students are displaying increasingly complex problems.
“Schools must offer basic mental health training to all staff, have specialized trained teachers, have support for staff to share the challenges they may face in their students and themselves, [and] have clear school policies and procedures on what to do with students with different mental health conditions,” added Krause.
A government spokesman said: “We are supporting teachers to help children and young people recover from the emotional impact of the pandemic, including by offering training to senior mental health leaders in all state schools and universities by 2025.
“To help students with more complex needs, we have also invested an additional £79m to expand children’s mental health services and speed up the deployment of mental health support teams, giving almost three million children in England access to health experts through school or university. by April 2024.”
