That this House has considered special educational needs and children’s mental health services.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairwomanship, Ms Fovargue. It is timely to be holding this debate in Children’s Mental Health Week. Today I want to focus on one aspect of mental health—specifically, the conditions that fall under the wider banner of special educational needs.
The difficulty that families in West Berkshire experience in seeking a diagnosis has been raised with me since I was first elected, but it was not until I conducted a constituency-wide survey last summer that I understood the extent of its prevalence and urgency. For many people in West Berkshire, accessing CAMHS—child and adolescent mental health services—for diagnosis of a potential learning difficulty is an extraordinary uphill battle. Waiting times regularly exceed two years for an autism diagnosis and can be substantially longer. I know that this problem also exists in other parts of the country.
When I was preparing for this debate, I asked affected families to get in touch with me, and was overwhelmed by responses, which came from everyone from mums and dads through to headteachers and GPs. The Minister whom I expected to respond to the debate, the Minister for Care and Mental Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), is not in her place, but I had a word with the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), in advance. The issue as it affects West Berkshire is less about a lack of funding—the Berkshire West clinical commissioning group has received additional investment for this—and more about accountability and the adequacy of the service. I have had too many letters and emails to refer to them all, but I would like to tell hon. Members about three of my constituents, whose stories capture the issue more widely.
I thank the hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) for securing this important debate. I was not expecting to be called quite so early.
I will focus my remarks on my own personal experience of having ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, none of which were recognised during my schooling. I want to highlight this because it is a journey of things going wrong and children not being fully supported.
By the age of 12, the average child with ADHD has received 20,000 more negative comments about their behaviour than their peers. “Lazy,” “distracted,” “too chatty,” “fidgety,” “failing to meet potential,” “disorganised” and “in disarray”: those were all comments that were levelled at me as a child, and they stick in my brain to this day and make me consider all my actions daily. This has led to huge feelings of anxiety and depression—a feeling that I am always doing something wrong. My ADHD was diagnosed only last year, and I have only just started taking medication, which has been life-changing.
There are two sides to the coin on this issue. When children and young people are supported at home and in school with the love and understanding that they deserve and need, they can flourish, as I feel I have flourished. I thank my family for the support that they showed me throughout my education to enable me to get to where I am today.
However, I meet too many children whose stories are still the same: their needs are not recognised or are not severe enough to merit critical help, and they are stuck in the middle, reaching their potential in some subjects and failing in others. They also feel that they are not listened to, that they cannot access support and that there is something critically wrong with them. They internalise negative comments about themselves, which is really damaging in the long term.
There are also lots of huge positives to being neurodivergent. Neurodivergent people are more likely to be entrepreneurs, and to take the risk of setting up businesses. However, the dark side is that they are more likely to try illicit drugs and to get involved in crime. There really are bright and dark sides. To any young person who is struggling at school, I say: “Don’t worry. There is always something else for you to strive towards. You just need to find what you are good at, and you will relish that opportunity.” No one should be held back because they have a diagnosis of ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia. All children should be supported to get the best out of themselves.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue, and a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), who made a powerful speech. Sharing her personal experience in this place is a brave thing to do. It has informed our debate, and I am sure that the Minister will refer to that when she sums up.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) on securing the debate. Like her, I have been contacted by so many distressed parents of children with special educational needs. Their experiences of trying to get support for their children are summed up in exactly the word she used: a battle—it is really a battle. EHCPs are the entry ticket to specialist support, but the whole application and appeal processes seem designed to be difficult and time-consuming. As my hon. Friend said, too many times people have to repeat things that they have already said again and again. We must ensure that we have a tell-it-once approach to such things, however long the waiting list might be—she spoke movingly about that as well.
My constituent Samantha King’s four-year-old, for example, was receiving one-to-one nursery support in Wales before they moved to Newcastle-under-Lyme. She supplied extensive documentary evidence of the child’s need when they moved, yet she described having her child’s application refused on the basis that she had not included the reports that she had in fact submitted. That is all too common—things get lost and people have to fill in almost exactly the same form again or for another authority. It is extremely tedious and it breaks people down, and that is why this is such a battle.
Parents then find that they have to appeal to SENDIST, the special educational needs and disability tribunal, as the main route to access an EHCP. We need to analyse the proportion of successful appeals. If local authorities are turning down applications that are successful on appeal, those at the top of that league table need to think about why that is the case. They need to consider applications more carefully in the first place.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning transition, because it is there that a condition such as autism or ADHD can turn into a mental health condition. Does he agree that one of the key issues for the Government to consider is the training and availability of clinicians? Funding is now much better than it was, but we still do not have the trained clinicians who could cut through the waiting lists, which are causing so much frustration to far too many families.
My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely correct about the availability of clinicians. His intervention also speaks to the point made by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam that if these conditions are not treated at school, they can lead to severely negative mental health outcomes later in life.
My constituent Mr Winkle has fought for many years to obtain suitable educational and therapeutic support for his son. Following a tribunal decision last month, he was sent a revised EHCP that still contained a number of inaccuracies, including out-of-date details about his son’s residential placement. I want to talk a little about residential placements, which have not been raised much so far, because the lack of suitable placements causes distress to many families.
One constituent described how the 14-year-old in her care only receives an hour’s at-home tuition a day, because a suitable therapeutic placement with a small and consistent staff team cannot be found. Alternatively, children are given residential educational provision that is unsuitable, which can cause them to regress and even, in one case, to self-harm.
Another common complaint is that social workers change too regularly, so the social worker does not truly know the child. Parents may not be told who the new social worker is and many have described the difficulty they experience when trying to get in touch with professionals, as telephone calls are not returned.
Despite parents being the ones with the most knowledge of the child or young person they are caring for, they struggle to be heard. Should they then complain, they describe encountering a complaints process that is frankly not fit for purpose: timescales are not followed; complaints sometimes seem to be ignored completely; and it is only possible to complain to the ombudsman with a final response, but that often never seems to arrive, and even when they do complain, it will take months for the ombudsman to reply. Furthermore, adults involved in the care of children can become fearful of complaining, in case there are reprisals in the form of their contact with the child being blocked.
It is, as always, a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) on securing the debate. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake). I have a friend who was diagnosed with ADHD in his 50s. He is a very talented musician but he really struggled at school and with the basic things in life. He, too, says that the medication has made a huge difference.
As we have heard, life is a never-ending battle for many parents of children with SEND. They have to deal with their child’s physical and mental health needs, trying to get the right diagnosis and all sorts of things on top of that: hospital appointments, physiotherapy, daily meds, vulnerability to viruses, communication issues, issues with trying to get their child to eat properly, and behavioural problems. They face all those things at home, and then they have to battle with bureaucracy, and they often feel that they are at war with the very people who are meant to be there to help them. They feel that the system is stacked against them and that sometimes people would rather they went away and stopped being such a nuisance—what the hon. Member for Newbury said about CAMHS in that context very much resonated with me.
The first battle that parents often face is to get the right diagnosis for their child. Then there is a battle to get the EHCPs. Then the councils say they do not really have the power to enforce them. If a child develops mental health problems, it is often a battle to get support from CAMHS, and parents of neurodivergent children, in particular, sometimes find that they are being bounced around between CAMHS and SEND provision, with nobody stepping in to help them.
In 2019, it was estimated that 6.8% of children in Bristol had special educational needs or disabilities, and it is true that Bristol City Council has struggled to meet the needs of those children—as we have heard, that seems to be the case with many councils. We had a pretty damning Ofsted report in 2019, and the council says it is now absolutely committed to trying to do better with its Belonging strategy and a three-year, £6.1 million education transformation programme. There are concerns about getting schools to buy into that, and some parents have said that a significant number of schools are batting away struggling pupils even though they have a legal duty to meet the needs of SEND children.
9:54 am
James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve before you, Ms Fovargue. I commend my constituency neighbour in Berkshire, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris), for securing the debate. I also pass on the best wishes of our right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who regrets that she cannot be here today. She asked me to point out that she fully supports every effort to increase the provision of mental health support for children in Berkshire and beyond. Finally, I want to welcome Dr Priya Singh, who is the new chief executive of the Frimley integrated care system and who I met yesterday to discuss this issue.
Time is short but, in brief, local NHS CCGs spent £12 billion in 2020-21 on mental health support. NHS England spent a further £2 billion, making a total of just over £14 billion. That is great, but I was horrified to learn that CCGs spent 14 times more on adult mental health support than on services for children. We need to invest much more heavily in that area.
East Berkshire, where I reside, has £2.6 million in funding for children’s mental health, including £1.4 million for CAMHS and £200,000 for eating disorders. That is not enough, which is my opening contention to the Minister. The Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, based in Bracknell, does a fantastic job, but the demand for mental health assessment in children has gone up by 60% in the past five years. Since the pandemic, it has gone up by a further 27%. We have a problem. A constituent wrote to me only yesterday to tell me that the current wait for a child to be seen by CAMHS is 30 months; prior to the pandemic it was 18 months. Families are being left unsupported at this time.
As politicians, we spend lots of time admiring the problem, but perhaps not enough time thinking about the solution. What do we need to do? The first thing I would say to the Minister is that the SEND review is still awaited. It was promised last year and has failed to materialise. Will she please ensure that we get it as soon as possible? We also need to invest in our children with SEND as never before. That requires money, patience, determination and a much clearer Government strategy.
Why might that work? By providing the right care in the right settings we can give our children the focus they need to be productive, employable, law-abiding and responsible citizens. Prisons are sadly full of people who have made the wrong decisions or acted impulsively, perhaps because they were not diagnosed at an early age. Let us invest in more specialist educational settings, so that people’s needs can be addressed. Yes, that is expensive and resource-heavy, but the cost of not doing so will always be greater, and this is non-discretionary spending.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) on securing this timely debate in Children’s Mental Health Week.
Over the past year—frankly, five years—the number of parents writing to me about their children and the lack of support has grown exponentially. I was a teacher before I was an MP, and I commend the speech made by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), because she is right that this is about allowing young people to be themselves. The word “special” is the right one: just look at the number of Nobel prize winners with neurodiversity in their make-up. When I taught maths and physics, these children were often the brightest, most interesting people in the room. They should never be seen as a burden.
The way the system treats families and children who are neurodiverse makes it so difficult for them that it is understandable how that goes on to affect their mental health. One family contacted me about Poppy—I have changed her name—who is 12. As previously described, there was violent behaviour in the household, and the family was incredibly worried. It took months to even get the GP to refer to CAMHS. The mother said to me:
“Mrs Moran, to be honest, you are my last hope. I am suffering with both my physical and mental health and quite honestly I do not have the energy left to continue fighting the system.”
We are also in a perverse situation where even more professionals are writing to me. I would be curious to know if that is the same for other hon. Members. This is new. GPs are also writing to me, as are educational psychologists, because they all recognise that CAMHS is broken. I had one psychologist write to me saying that he no longer refers to CAMHS. He said that social services and CAMHS are so broken that the only thing he can do is keep children on his books because he worries that if he loses contact with them they will not get anything at all. How is this system not failing our young people? It absolutely is.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) for bringing forward this important debate.
I do not think we realise the crisis that our children face on mental health. It is hard growing up—we all remember growing up—but our young people face an even more traumatic time following the pandemic. I truly believe that our children and young people have been badly affected by the pandemic and also by social media—we did not have social media, growing up, with that extra, 24/7 pressure.
On educational attainment, I have a 17-year-old daughter going through A-levels and a 15-year-old son going through GCSEs, and I can speak with authority about just how much pressure they are under. However, I cannot imagine how families cope with all the extra pressure when that is compounded by a special educational need.
I want to speak about people’s actual experiences in schools. I recently spoke to the head of a Westminster secondary school, who is a very experienced teacher. She said that she has never, in her 20-plus years as a teacher, known such a crisis in the mental health of young people and particularly teenagers. The pandemic has obviously compounded that, but we are now seeing far more anxiety, self-harming and suicidal thoughts. That is what she explained to me. The pressure that that head and her staff are under—to help and support the young people going through these things—has created even more of a burden for them. They are taking advantage of the Mind counsellors and the extra help that the Government are providing, but it simply is not enough.
There seems to be a disconnect between the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care, because there is no one Minister taking control, and I ask the Minister to really consider that point. We cannot just leave it to schools to try to navigate special educational needs and support for families. We must make sure that there is one place for teachers to go for that support. There is such pressure on budgets now in schools. The head I spoke to told me how much they were now spending on extra support for pupils, which comes out of the general budget. I plead with the Minister to try to secure more funding for this issue from the Department for Education.
10:06 am
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The first is Steffi Whelan, who told me about her 11-year-old son. He has been waiting more than two years for a CAMHS appointment. His problems began seriously in year 4. What began as outbursts of screaming in class evolved into something more disruptive. Sometimes he would tear up work or behave in a way that was completely unsustainable for the teacher. In time, he was moved from that primary school to another, and his parents have been told that he will not be emotionally able to move on to an ordinary secondary school. He is now nearing the end of year 6, and despite all of that, the family are still waiting for their first appointment.
Melanie Fenemore told me about her nine-year-old son, Archie, who was strongly suspected to have autism. Melanie was first referred to CAMHS in October 2018. She filled out a load of complicated forms, and in January 2019 was told that her son was on the waiting list and to expect a 20-month delay. In fact, she waited 27 months before he was seen in April last year. At the time of the assessment, the view was formed that he probably did not have autism spectrum disorder but had something more equivalent to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and he was referred to the ADHD team. Again, Melanie was sent a bunch of forms, which she described as “pretty much identical” to the previous ones, and her son was sent back to the bottom of a waiting list. The family have been told to expect a 36-month wait. If that projection is correct, Archie will have been on a waiting list for six years, from the age of six to 12, by the time he receives his first appointment. During this time, Archie’s mum tells me, he has
“expressed a desire not to be alive.”
He has a tendency towards violence, born out of frustration. She says:
“I am sometimes at the receiving end of Archie’s violent outbursts which hurt more as he gets older.”
The Buller family’s young daughter, Daisy, has been waiting more than two years for an autism diagnosis. By the time her mum contacted me last July, her daughter was self-harming and barely attending school, even though she was in the crucial year 10. Her mum wrote to me:
“This is 5 years since we first started struggling and we are no closer to helping my daughter. Simply one question Laura, in today’s age, how is this Ok.”
One headteacher of a primary school described the waiting times as “absolutely awful”, with another saying that the situation has got worse in recent years. Valiant efforts are made by West Berkshire Council to offer support through its Emotional Health Academy, but that is not a substitute for a clear diagnosis. A head at a primary told me that until they get a CAMHS diagnosis,
“The child may be excluded or at risk of exclusion, their anxiety will often worsen and they don’t attend school, the school can try but it cannot put in the support that it is required until there is an Educational Health Care Plan in place and CAMHS diagnoses are critical to this.”
The headteacher of Kennet School in Thatcham said,
“While schools will have an indication of what a pupils needs may be, a diagnosis through CAMHS leads to targeted work and accessing additional services to further support the child and their family. A huge part of a SEND diagnosis is the support”.
It enables the young person to
“understand themselves. Where a diagnosis is not yet given, this delays the essential step for the young person, causing more erratic behaviours and often fall-out at home as well as at school.”
The short point is that a timely CAMHS diagnosis is often crucial for life chances. It hardly needs to be said that a child who is repeatedly excluded can easily end up in a pupil referral unit. People with neurodiverse conditions are significantly over-represented in the prison estate and the youth estate. Their employment opportunities are often compromised, anyway—it is said that only one in five people with autism sustain full-time employment—and in teenagers there is a significant correlation with depression and self-harm. Timely diagnosis and the correct support is crucial for addressing that.
I want to focus on the Government response so that my speech does not sound like a barrage of criticism. I know that the Government attach significant importance to improving outcomes for those who are neurodiverse. The SEND review, to be published soon, is a testament to that, as is the work being done to ensure that children with autism will have a designated key worker within the next year or so. Hundreds of millions of pounds of additional funding was made available for CAMHS in the spending review, and I have to concede that West Berkshire is one of the first 25 areas that will pilot the schools-based mental health support teams.
I said at the start of my speech that Berkshire West CAMHS received significant investment from the Government last year—£1.6 million in April 2021. In fact, when I spoke to the service a few months ago, it said that funding was no longer the problem. The money will enable it to recruit another 27 members of staff that it so badly needs, although so far it has managed to recruit only 12.
Despite a detailed local transformation plan published last September, in which some laudable ambitions were set out, including a goal of reducing waiting times for diagnoses to just a year by next month, when I spoke to Berkshire West CAMHS, it conceded that there is in fact no fixed deadline for reaching that target, so it is not really a target at all; it is nothing more than a general ambition. There is no consequence if the service fails to reduce waiting times. I regret to say that that is not good enough.
The overall impression of Berkshire West’s child and adolescent mental health service is that there is a serious lack of urgency or accountability. Dr James Cave, the well-respected medical director of the Downland Practice in my constituency, wrote to me:
“I think it is important that you understand the depths of despair GPs feel about the local CAMHS service. Remote, unresponsive, closed, uncommunicative sums them up. It feels as if they are always looking for a way NOT to have to see a child. They demand detailed referral forms from us…and then find reasons not to see a child. If they do accept a referral the wait is forever and then often the intervention is a fixed predetermined intervention that does not take”
into account
“the needs of a child.”
I am not seeking to humiliate anyone, but families in West Berkshire are being failed, and it is my role and my responsibility to fight for them.
The Health Secretary has said time and again that the Health and Care Bill currently making its way through the House will deliver better accountability. Speaking in the debate in July, he stated:
“The third theme of the Bill is greater accountability.”—[Official Report, 14 July 2021; Vol. 699, c. 430.]
He said that people have the right to expect “clear lines of accountability” for how every priority is delivered. So my plea—a cri de coeur—from the many families in West Berkshire is that the Department demands better accountability from CAMHS in West Berkshire and across the country. We want details of how that £1.6 million will be spent, and firm commitments to reduce waiting lists, with consequences if managers fail to deliver.
The issue is not confined to West Berkshire, but it is stark within it, and I therefore speak today for the families that I represent and all those families across the country who are experiencing the same struggle.
However, far too often our education system is one-size-fits-all. I am really proud to chair the all-party parliamentary group for special educational needs and disabilities. It is so important that we change the classroom and home environment for these children, so that their behaviours are understood, and they can fully experience school and get to where they need to be.
So many things have gone wrong during the pandemic. Some children with autism have flourished through online learning, but others have found themselves isolated from their friends, peers, teachers and support. Several organisations are yet to start providing the therapeutic interventions that they are meant to provide under children’s education, health and care plans, and this is causing huge disruption to the ability of those children to thrive. Three quarters of disabled children have seen progress in managing their conditions and overall development regress in the pandemic. This is urgent and critical. Those who receive a diagnosis of dyslexia should also be screened for ADHD or other neurodivergent conditions, because the crossover is huge. We are letting our young people down by not helping them to get the tools they need to understand themselves—first and foremost—and how they fit in with the world.
I hope that the Minister will think more about how we can intervene as early as possible to avoid young people becoming incredibly depressed and anxious about just who they are—because they are round pegs trying to fit into square holes. It is critical that we support young people to thrive and give back to our society and economy by being the great pioneers and entrepreneurs that we all want to see.
I also have the privilege of having someone with autism in my family—
Even when someone gets an EHCP, the battle continues. Parents in my constituency report annual reviews not taking place, or the plans not being updated for months following review, severely impacting on a child’s progress through education. A lot of things go wrong in the transitions between stages of education or into work.
Added to that is the struggle to obtain adequate mental health treatment. One constituent of mine was told that the priority waiting list for CAMHS—not the list to which my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury was referring earlier—is 11 months in Staffordshire. That is the priority list. Only this week, a constituent described how she is desperate for respite provision, having accepted a child back into her care on the basis that the local authority would support her.
The local authority has been good at keeping in touch, but its hands have been tied by what it says is a lack of resources. As well as struggling to find an educational placement for the young person, it has only just found an agency to take him on outings twice a week. After five and a half months of caring 24/7, my constituent is exhausted and in the terrible position of considering having to say that she can no longer look after the young man. She has been let down by a breach of implied trust—the local authority told her that it would support her, but it has not been able to.
As Members of Parliament, we inevitably hear the failures, rather than the success stories, but I welcome any support that can be given to improve the experience of so many. As my constituent Mr Winkle said:
“In this journey I have communicated with many regulatory bodies each claiming to have the child’s interests wishes and safety at the forefront of their agenda...but as I have experienced this is certainly not so...my assumption is that it’s a closed circle and these entities do not know how to facilitate or co-ordinate any kind of solution and just want it to ‘Go Away’.”
I am sure that is not the full truth of it, but that is the experience that people are having out there.
I welcome the imminent Green Paper and the additional funding, but too many people have been failed for far too long. I hope the Minister will be able to address that when she responds.
Children should never be put in the “too difficult” box, but I have heard many examples of children being out of school without any support or just having part-time schooling or perhaps hospital school tutoring—if a child has to go into hospital because of their underlying physical disabilities or illness, they will have education there, but not when they are at home. Parents complain about schools having a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with children with additional needs, while there are complaints from schools that they can no longer afford teaching assistants, who are so valuable in providing children with the one-to-one attention they need.
Delay can make a huge difference to children’s wellbeing and future attainment, as we have heard. We know that half of all mental health problems are established by the age of 14. Tragically, in some cases, young lives will be lost if we do not intervene early. In 2017, suicide was the most common cause of death for both boys and girls aged between five and 19.
I would like the Minister to commit to provide mental health support in every school, early interventions so that we can spot the signs—otherwise, problems will increase in severity—and respect for a child’s individuality. I know that that costs more and needs more resources, but the problem with these pathways—the hon. Member for Newbury talked about fixed, predetermined interventions—is that it does not help to refer a child with autism for counselling based on cognitive behavioural therapy, because their minds just do not work like that. Finally, we also need better in-patient services, because sending children hundreds of miles away from home, when they need intensive support, is absolutely unconscionable.
I would like to see every local authority in the UK comprehensively reviewing its SEND provision, so that it becomes available in every area. Specialist and dedicated settings are the way forward for those who need them. We need to give our teachers better training with education, health and care plans. Those should not become a magic bullet—a passport for the lucky few—but a rightful passport for every child to get the support they need.
Lastly, CAMHS across the UK need 20,000 volts put straight through them. For families to wait two and a half years for a consultation is not only immoral but frankly inept. The irony will not have escaped anybody here that a GP cannot prescribe medication for ASD, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, Asperger’s or any other mental health condition, without a diagnosis from CAMHS. We have to focus on CAMHS right now.
To conclude, let us please get spending, diagnosing and treating, and let us give all our children, not least in Berkshire, the future they deserve.
My first question to the Minister is on the lack of educational psychologists in this country. My local county council is doing its very best; it is one of the F40 councils and is twelfth-lowest in the country when it comes to the high needs block. I said, “If you had a magic wand and could ask for anything from the Minister, what would it be?” and the council said, “More educational psychologists.” We currently fund only 200 training places in the country. There is only one educational psychologist for every 5,000 young people, which is nowhere near enough. Tackling that issue would go a huge way towards immediately helping to alleviate the backlog.
In the interim, there are amazing third-party groups that are helping. There is Shift, which is an informal parent group in Abingdon, set up by Sally and Andy Foulsham. They run it, provide support and help families navigate the system. There is also The Abingdon Bridge, which is the only wellbeing and mental health charity for young people in Vale of White Horse. It focuses on 18 to 25-year-olds. It is particularly worried about the 16 to 18-year olds that it finds because, if they are referred to CAMHS, the waiting lists are so long that they then drop off that cliff edge. Strangely, the charity cannot access funding from the CCG because of the way that the funding works. Could the Minister help me help The Abingdon Bridge to access more funding?
To conclude where I started, we absolutely must appreciate that these children deserve the best, and deserve more, but the current system is failing them. There is a perverse disincentive in the system, where a school must basically pay the first £6,000 of the funding. We need a national SEND strategy that solves the problem once and for all. Without that, we risk failing our children and our country in the future.
In Children’s Mental Health Week, I pay tribute to the local authorities in my constituency. This week, Westminster launched a trial of a keyring, which will reach 4,000 young people. They simply scan a QR code to take them to a special hub, which will give them the advice and support they need. That is the kind of practical help we need to give our children, but this is also about getting the funding that our schools need, to ensure that our young people have the future they deserve.