The NHS specialist services for giving children support with mental health illness is a third. This number is starling and unbelievable. 

Adults are getting more support from specialists than children an expert says. 

Before the end of this parliament, Lord Layard children's wellbeing expert influenced the committee to push for a rollout. He said to the committee "the young people in the most trouble are the people who are diagnosable, we are talking about 10% of our children. The shocking thing is that only about a third of these children get any form of specialist support. This is much worse for adults."

He also added "it's unbelievable that we have that situation, we have CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health services) that has such a high treshold- unless you're stabbing your sister, or something like, that you're assessed not to be bad enough. And until recently there have been no resources for anyone below the CAMHS treshold."

Mouhssin Ismail said, "even when we refer to CAMHS, the waiting lists are significant and the students that need the help are not getting it in a timely manner."

At the end of October 2021, there were 349,449 children in touch with NHS child and adolescent psychiatric teams, the highest number on record. Only those with the most serious mental health problems are referred for specialist care.

Dr. Rosena Allin-Khan, shadow minister for mental health said " imagine if we treated childhood cancer like we do children's mental illness, waiting for symptoms to get worse before they see a specialist. waiting for months or even years for treatment, leaving patients and parents to rely on charity- there would be an outcry."  This is what the government is doing she claimed.

The government plan by 2023 is to have 400 mental health teams to support schools. The government planned to have an extra 345,000 children accessing support by 2023-24.