Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Children, Young People and Education committee this morning. We've received apologies for absence from Siân Gwenllian and there is no substitute this morning. Can I ask if Members have got any declarations of interest they'd like to make, please? No? Okay. Thank you. Item 2 this morning, then, is a further session on our follow-up on our 'Mind over matter' report. I'm very pleased to welcome Carol Shillabeer, who is chief executive of Powys Teaching Health Board, and who manages the Together for Children and Young People programme. Thank you very much for attending, and thank you for the written update that you provided in advance to the committee. We've got a lot of ground that we want to cover this morning, so if it's okay we'll go straight into questions. If I can just start and ask you if you're satisfied with the progress that's been made since the programme was established in 2015.
Thank you very much for that question, Chair. I've got to say 'yes', in many regards. So, the key focus of the programme in the early stages was about improving access to specialist child and adolescent mental health services. We developed the windscreen model—or we lifted the windscreen model. Other models that are very similar have been talked about as well, and our big focus was on ensuring that we could make immediate progress around access to specialist CAMHS. It's some years ago now since this committee did the original report, and obviously Healthcare Inspectorate Wales and the Wales Audit Office had done reports in the past, and I think there was a need for a programme that could focus on action. You'll see in the written update that we covered quite a large number of areas, and so therefore had to make a prioritisation. The prioritisation was at the specialist CAMHS end. We have provided the committee with a red, amber or green rating of where we feel that we were, and that was just before submission of the evidence. Overall I would say we have made progress. I recognise you recognise that in your 'Mind over matter' report, and that is pleasing. What I would say, though, is that there's a still a lot to be done. Certainly over the last nine months or so, we've seen a real momentum around the whole-school approach work, which we're not actually leading now as a programme, although we facilitated the workshop held in September. But that's got a real momentum, and the absolute priority now is the early help and enhanced support part of the work moving forward, and I'm sure we will come on to that in more detail. But we know there is more community workforce in specialist CAMHS, we know we're seeing children in a shorter time frame, and we know we're accepting more referrals, so our indicators are telling us we are making progress.
Thank you. And you referred to the work on the whole-school approach, which is very welcome, and I recognise that the programme has been involved in driving that as well. But I'm sure you'll also recognise the emphasis that the committee has placed on this being a whole-system approach to children and young people's mental health, and we feel very strongly that if any of the areas get out of balance, then it will jeopardise the progress in other parts of the programme. Are there any particular areas where you feel you haven't made enough progress that you'd like to draw the committee's attention to?
This is maybe about what the programme's done, but really around the broader sense as well. I'm going to be very straight and say we should have made more progress on psychological therapies. I'm disappointed that we haven't. I'm assured that we've got capacity in place now and the drive in place to get the Matrics Cymru framework developed for children and young people. I've had discussions with the national psychological therapies committee, who have owned this, and we're working together more on this area. That's not to say for one minute that health boards and local areas haven't been working on psychological therapy service provision and changing the models, but that is an area we should have made, I think, earlier progress on. There's been a general reflection from myself and the Together for Children and Young People programme board over the phase of the programme. I think we started very strongly; I think we probably had a bit of a lull in the middle, if I'm truthful about that—we had a change of personnel, and we really gathered a momentum over the last year or 18 months, and that has helped to push us from a focus on specialist CAMHS into that whole-school approach. But, if I could just agree with your comments about the whole system, it has to be the whole system and that's why the real focus now on early help and enhanced support is critical. If I can just say, in case I don't get a chance to say this later, I was delighted to see the focus on youth work yesterday, because what is clear is for that part, the early help and enhanced support, this isn't just about the NHS and it's not just about education, it's about every part of the system, really, which does make it more complex. But I just wanted to say that I think that youth work has perhaps not have the recognition that it's needed and yesterday was a positive step.