The new president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) has called for a post-pandemic national review of children’s mental health services.
Director of children’s services for Hampshire CC and the Isle of Wight Steve Crocker used his inaugural speech to make an ‘opening pitch for a further national review of children’s mental health services’.
The ‘alarm had been sounding for some time on the growing mental health concerns amongst children and young people’, said Mr Crocker.
Children and young people’s mental health services need radical reform, he added, ‘notwithstanding pockets of transformation in localities’.
Services are too rooted in clinical diagnostics and ‘adrift from the child-centered, whole family and relationships-based working that is increasingly the norm in wider services for children’, he added.
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