The broad health assessment will include those elements. It must include a summary by the agency’s medical adviser of the
child’s current physical and mental health, so both are included. When an application is made to a court for a placement order, the agency is required to submit the summary as part of the application. Local clinical commissioning groups should use these assessments of looked-after children and adopted children to inform their local transformation plans to ensure that they can meet the needs of their local population.
At the national level, the Department for Education hosted a roundtable event last month bringing together children’s social care and mental health stakeholders to discuss how to improve mental health services for looked-after children and adopted children. As a result, we are considering how centres of excellence, possibly linked to regional adoption agencies, might enable the mental health needs of looked-after children and adopted children to be better met. Following that roundtable event, Edward Timpson, the Minister of State for Children and Families, met Alistair Burt, the Minister of State for Community and Social Care, to discuss how to ensure that mental health services can meet the particular needs of these children and young people in an effective and timely way. I should like to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that the two departments are working closely together.
In addition, we are providing £4.5 million of funding in this financial year to accelerate the development and implementation of regional adoption agencies. Adoption support, including mental health, is a key element of that. We are clear that regional adoption agencies should have a focus on improving the assessment of adopted children’s mental health needs and the provision of appropriate mental health support services. I should also mention the government-funded adoption support fund. More than 2,000 families have already benefited from £7.5 million of therapeutic services provided by the fund for adopted children and their families. We know that getting a high-quality assessment of need is critical, and local authorities are increasingly using the fund to pay for specialist assessments and, where appropriate, specialist therapeutic support.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, raised concerns about this Government’s focus on adoption. We are engaged in comprehensive reform, but we are also doing a number of other things. For instance, we have established a programme of reform for social work, including the development of new assessment and accreditation systems for three levels of professional practice for children’s social workers in England. We have created the children’s services innovation programme and we have introduced “staying put” to allow children to remain with their former foster carers after the age of 18. We are engaged in reform across children’s services that will benefit all looked-after children.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, asked about getting CAMHS into schools. We heard from head teachers who came to the briefing a few weeks ago that one of the benefits of multi-academy trusts is being able to recruit professionals to work across a number of schools, so we are seeing improvements in that. Alongside this, the Future in Mind report says that there will be mental health training for health professionals and others who work with children and young people, such as staff in schools, to help them to identify problems
and ensure that young people get the help that they need. So it is something that is on our agenda and we are continuing to look at how we can improve that.
I hope that the explanations I have given will reassure the noble Lord that we are committed to meeting the objectives of these amendments, and that he will be feel reassured enough to withdraw his amendment.
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