What is the MHST?

The Mental Health Support Team (MHST) provides an easily accessed service for pupils from primary to year 13 who may be experiencing a range of mild to moderate difficulties with their mental health. MHST’s are based within education settings, so if you would like to know if your school is covered by an MHST then please contact the school SENCO or the MHST on the numbers provided.
Each MHST consists of 14 team members, and include:

  • Education Mental Health Practitioners (EMHP)
  • Mental Health Practitioners (MHP)
  • Senior Mental Health Practitioners (SMHP)
  • Clinical Project Lead

Each school is covered by an EMHP, a mental health practitioner and a senior mental health practitioner. We also have friendly admin staff who you are likely to speak to first if you ring up.

Difficulties the MHST can help with:

  • Low mood
  • Worry
  • Anxiety (simple phobias, separation anxiety and health anxiety)
  • Panic episodes
  • Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
  • Single episodes of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)

  • Thoughts of self-harm and injury (non life threatening self-harm/injury – basic harm reduction, assessing risk and management advice

What do the MHST do?

Assessments with young people and families to understand more about their difficulties.

  • Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which is usually on a one-to-one basis
  • CBT informed group work
  • Psychoeducation sessions to help young people and families understand more about mental health

As well as working with you, we also work with education teams to develop a whole school approach to mental health, this means that we offer training, webinars, complete assemblies and support with the PSHE curriculum.

If you are feeling frequently sad, worried or anxious and feel you may need support from our team, please speak to a member of staff at your school, who will refer you directly to the service. We have regular consultations with our schools to support a whole school approach to mental health and discuss potential requests for support into the service.

A request for support has been made, what next? 

Once we have received your request for support, we will look at the information and decide whether you would be best seen by MHST or if another service would best meet your needs e.g. Clinical Psychology, Educational Psychology, Learning Disability Team or Eating Disorder Team.

What happens when we see you?

The first appointment with us is often called an initial assessment or screening. This is a safe space where you can talk to us about the worries and difficulties that you are experiencing, and we will talk to you about the ways that either our team or another service can help and support you. This appointment can take place virtually or face to face and we usually complete therapeutic sessions in school.

If we think that help from MHST would be appropriate for you, we will talk about who would be best to do this and we will involve you in the planning and care as well as decisions about discharging you from our service. We use questionnaires and other rating scales to form part of our assessments, to understand your difficulties and to see whether we have been able to make a difference.