Ms Sarah Stockham:

That is certainly one of the reasons to pursue the model. We have traditional child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, across the country. Those services include the core professions that require three years or more training. Those professions include nursing, occupational therapy, social work, counselling, psychology etc. The idea behind this model is that EMHPs can be trained in one year while they are on the job. The people working in the schools who can complete these skills come from any background. They must only be interested in learning those therapeutic techniques. Because they are so heavily supervised by people with additional qualifications, we can work to build that workforce. For example, some of our EMHPs are ex-teachers, ex-teaching assistants and people who have in the past run fear of flying courses with airlines and who were made redundant during the pandemic. We also have psychology graduates or previous assistant psychologists who want to get a recognised qualification. They are limited in what they can offer. They can only offer low-intensity CBT interventions and a whole-of-school approach. However, that frees up our colleagues in the other services, such as our core CAMHS, to focus on those young people with additional and more specialised needs. It is a way of managing capacity and demand. The EHMP model provides early help in prevention. If more specialist support is needed, we can then escalate a case through our more core CAMHS pathways.