Young People Wellbeing and Covid
Mentoring Plus - Bath & North East Somerset
Our mission is empowering and inspiring young lives to thrive with the help of our communities.
Kev Long is Head of Practice at award-winning youth charity Mentoring Plus. In Children’s Mental Health Week, he offer answers to two questions he’s often asked: is young people’s wellbeing worse since lockdown, and what can we do to help?
The young people I meet in my work have always been those struggling with mental wellbeing. Long before Covid impacted any of us, they were getting referred to our charity because they needed support with it.
At Mentoring Plus we work by the principle that young people who are angry, dysregulated, disengaged or socially isolated show these behaviours because of unmet needs – which might be educational, emotional or social needs, and sometimes more basic requirements like adequate sleep and nutrition – and the feelings these unmet needs create.
Behaviour is communication. It’s the tip of the iceberg we can see. When the feelings and unmet needs below the waterline lead to behaviours prompting school exclusion or non-attendance, the underlying feelings get worse: low self-esteem, anxiety and rejection, making young people’s mental wellbeing still worse.
Something I’m often asked is how much the last two years of disruption and lockdowns have added to the difficulties our young people face, and what we can do about it. Let me attempt to provide some answers based on what our staff are experiencing through their daily work, matched with what other organisations are suggesting nationally and locally.
Is young people’s mental wellbeing worse since lockdown?
So first off, yes we are seeing an increase in young people presenting with challenges around their mental wellbeing. Since the current academic year started, all our provisions at Mentoring Plus are at capacity, with referral enquiries far in excess of our resources.
Young people are coming to us more universally with anxiety, low mood, social isolation, disconnection with their community and little sense of any positive future ahead of them. Self-harm in various forms is sadly common, and so is low attendance in school.
This is something that we saw throughout lockdown periods, and we endeavoured to meet these needs alongside other services, agencies and schools. We transformed our face-to-face service and constantly evolved provision to keep mentoring relationships going despite changing guidelines.
Schools were, and still are, under incredible pressure trying to support young people presenting with such difficulties whilst also providing access to education to our children – to which every one of them is of course entitled. They’ve done everything possible to provide a safe space for vulnerable young people. The support agencies they rely on are up to their eyes too, which negatively impacts resources in universal services like schools.
We work in close partnership with other local charities, and in spring 2021 one of these, Bath YFC, undertook a study of over 100 11-17 year olds in our county about the effects of COVID-19 restrictions.
They found that that mental wellbeing was one of the main factors impacted by the lockdown, with 45% of respondents reporting this. One said “My social anxiety has got a lot worse”, where another expressed “Lockdown has had a huge impact on my mental health. At the start I had lots of panic attacks and was full of anxiety and that was very difficult for me”.
Support is hard to access
Against this backdrop we know mental health support is hard to access. Last year our local CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services - the statutory NHS service for treating young people with emotional, behavioural or mental health difficulties) told other services they were only seeing emergency cases due to having 40% staff vacancies.
Nationally, demand for services is at an all-time high while supply is under enormous pressure. The NSPCC reports a 35% increase in young people seeking mental health support in 2021. The Royal College of Psychiatrists found a 77% increase in under-18s referred for specialist mental health care for issues such as self-harm and eating disorders in summer 2021 compared with the same period in 2019.
The Children’s Society recently reported a 50% increase in mental health difficulties experienced by young people in the last 3 years, but also that 75% of young people with mental health problems aren't getting the help they need.
What can health care, education and voluntary sector organisations like mine do about all this need? I believe there are ways we could use resources more wisely.
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So what can we do?
Apparently there was an extra £79m pledged for improving mental health support in England last year, and we’ll have 400 more mental health support teams to work with schools by 2023. I strongly believe within this, or alongside it, we urgently need a refocus on early intervention, including support for schools.
Of course, it’s difficult to fix the roof in the middle of a rainstorm. But if we only ever focus on emergency support, we’ll never stem the flow of young people who are showing earlier signs of poor mental wellbeing. Then when they hit crisis point, their experiences will be far worse than they need be, and the cost of their care and their lost opportunities will be far greater.
Early help means there’s time to chat about habits such as physical activity, social media use and self-care. It creates human connections and offers time to build trust and confidence. It helps keep young people attending school, where they are safer.
I’m an advocate because Mentoring Plus aims to work preventatively, and I see the impact for myself. I hear our mentees talking about the difference it makes that they have a longer intervention, see the same person consistently, build up trust and feel they can be heard within the professional processes surrounding them.
I also see what happens when we refer a young person for additional support, it doesn’t meet a needs threshold and they are part of a complex case conference six months later.
Schools need more early help services to call on
Schools are on the front line: as a universal service they see almost all young people and are well placed to identify needs. Schools are my organisation’s biggest single source of referrals and there’s no shortage of insight or compassion on the part of teachers and pastoral staff.
What there is a shortage of is support our local schools can call on when they see young people struggling with negative feelings and unmet needs – and that’s in a local authority area where some preventative work is still being funded. In locations where budget cuts have led to all early help services funding disappearing, it will be even worse.
If extra resources are truly available to support mental health, then alongside emergency mental health care we have to allocate funds to early help, and make it easy to access this via schools. Fixing the roof before the next storm means we all stay a bit drier, and it’s our young people who need that most.