The service must help those with a learning disability with all areas of their lives.  The experts took part in several training sessions to ensure they were properly prepared for the day.  They met, interviewed and reviewed the answers to questions they posed.  This input formed part of the criteria for awarding the contract which will start in April 2012.

One of the ECM experts also formed part of the panel to interview candidates put forward for the position of Joint Chair for the Kent LD Partnership Board.

This was an exciting opportunity for ECM Workbank and the Partners and we had several people go forward for the position which is funded by a grant from outside Kent County Council Youth Service.

It is the first public health strategy to give equal weight to both mental and physical health.  The government go on to say that mental health is central to our quality of life, central to our economic success and interdependent with our success in improving education, training and employment outcomes and tackling some of the persistent problems that scar our society, from homelessness, violence and abuse, to drug use and crime. They note that by practitioners promoting good mental health and intervening early, particularly in the crucial childhood and teenage years, we can help to prevent mental illness from developing and mitigate its effects when it does. It is recognised that good mental health and resilience are fundamental to our physical health, our relationships, our education, our training, our work and to achieving our full potential.

The strategy sets out six shared objectives to improve mental health and well-being. It supports the Government’s aim of achieving parity of esteem between physical and mental health. The interconnections between mental health, housing, employment, and the criminal justice system are stressed.

To read the objectives and key actions click here……..

1 More people will have good mental health

More people of all ages and backgrounds will have better wellbeing and good mental health. Fewer people will develop mental health problems – by starting well, developing well, working well, living well and ageing well. The agreed key areas for action are:

• ensuring a good start in life; and

• reducing the social and other determinants of mental ill health across all ages, and the inequalities that can both cause and be the result of mental health problems including, for example, social isolation, particularly among older people.

2 More people with mental health problems will recover

More people who develop mental health problems will have a good quality of life – greater ability to manage their own lives, stronger social relationships, a greater sense of purpose, the skills they need for living and working, improved chances in education, better employment rates and a suitable and stable place to live. The key areas for action are:

• to identify mental health problems and intervene early across all age groups;

• to ensure equity of access for all groups, including the most disadvantaged and excluded (for example people who are sleeping rough) to high-quality, appropriate, comprehensive services;

• to build care and support around outcomes that matter to individuals to enable them to live the lives they want to live, including good relationships, purpose, education, housing and employment;

• to offer people age- and developmentally-appropriate information, and a choice of high-quality evidence and/or good practice-based interventions, including psychological therapies;

• to ensure that all people with severe mental health problems receive high-quality care and treatment in the least restrictive environment, in all settings; and

• to work with the whole family, using whole-family assessment and support plans where appropriate.

3 More people with mental health problems will have good physical health

Fewer people with mental health problems will die prematurely, and more people with physical ill health will have better mental health. The agreed key areas for action are:

• that fewer people with mental health problems should have poor physical health
• that fewer people with mental health problems should die prematurely; and
• that fewer people with physical ill health, including those with long-term conditions and medically unexplained symptoms, should have mental health problems.

4 More people will have a positive experience of care and support

Care and support, wherever it takes place, should offer access to timely, evidence-based interventions and approaches that give people the greatest choice and control over their own lives, in the least restrictive environment, and should ensure that people’s human rights are protected. The agreed key areas for action are:

• that services should be designed around the needs of individuals, ensuring appropriate, effective transition between services when necessary, without discriminatory, professional, organisation or location barriers getting in the way; and

• that, wherever possible, services should listen to and involve carers and others with a valid interest and provide them with information about a patient’s care, to ensure that confidentiality does not become an obstacle to delivering safe services.

5 Fewer people will suffer avoidable harm

People receiving care and support should have confidence that the services they use are of the highest quality and at least as safe as any other public service. The relevant proposed outcome statements for adult social care are as follows:

• everyone enjoys physical safety and feels secure;

• people are free from physical and emotional abuse, harassment, neglect and self-harm; and

• people are protected as far as possible from avoidable deaths, disease and injury.

6 Fewer people will experience stigma and discrimination

Public understanding of mental health will improve and, as a result, negative attitudes and behaviours to people with mental health problems will decrease. The agreed priority is that fewer people will suffer from stigma and discrimination as a result of negative attitudes and behaviours towards people with mental health problems – to be achieved by improving public attitudes and reducing the institutionalised discrimination inherent in many organisations, including support services.

The government have highlighted statistics for the impact of mental health problems

• At least one in four people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their life and one in six adults has a mental health problem at any one time.
• One in ten children aged between 5 and 16 years has a mental health problem, and many continue to have mental health problems into adulthood.
• Half of those with lifetime mental health problems first experience symptoms by the age of 14,7 and three-quarters before their mid-20s.
• Self-harming in young people is not uncommon (10–13% of 15–16-year-olds have self-harmed).
• Almost half of all adults will experience at least one episode of depression during their lifetime.
• One in ten new mothers experiences postnatal depression.
• About one in 100 people has a severe mental health problem.
• Some 60% of adults living in hostels have a personality disorder.
• Some 90% of all prisoners are estimated to have a diagnosable mental health problem (including personality disorder) and/or a substance misuse problem.
• Mental ill health represents up to 23% of the total burden of ill health in the uK – the largest single cause of disability.
• the costs of mental health is close to £105 billion, of which around £30 billion is work related.30 Sickness absence due to mental health problems costs the UK economy £8.4 billion a year and also results in £15.1 billion in reduced productivity.
• the most common reason for incapacity benefits claims – around 43% of the 2.6 million people on long-term health-related benefits have a mental or behavioural disorder as their primary condition.

This new approach to government means a different approach to direction setting – developing strategies to achieve outcomes. Outcomes strategies reject the top-down approach of the past. Instead, they focus on how people can best be empowered to lead the lives they want to lead and to keep themselves and their families healthy, to learn and be able to work in safe and resilient communities, and on how practitioners on the front line can best be supported to deliver what matters to service users within an ethos that maintains dignity and respect.

ECM Workbank will also provide mentors to support partners with a learning disability to carry out monitoring visits as well as assisting with the recording and collation of information gathered. The final part of the project will be to provide a safe, supported, communication arena to gain feedback.

The new partners will be able to assist with the effective monitoring of learning disability services and ECM will provide a safe and supportive environment for adults with learning disabilities to respond to work opportunities. ECM will deliver a number of training and induction sessions for the new partners as well as assisting with the individual’s communication skill via training.

• Teaching and Leadership
• Behaviour
• Curriculum, Assessment and Qualifications
• New Schools System
• Accountability
• School Improvement
• School Funding
• Powers for teachers to improve discipline in the classroom
• Vision for a transformed school curriculum
• Reform of school performance tables
• Pupil premium to channel more money to the most deprived children, and
• Plans to develop a fairer and more transparent funding system.

This outline kindly comes from information given by extended schools: -

The bulletpoints and numbers directly correspond with the White Paper.  The underlined sections may be worth looking at in more depth.

Curriculum, assessment and qualifications 12. So, we will: Review the National Curriculum, with the aim of reducing prescription and allowing schools to decide how to teach, while refocusing on the core subject knowledge that every child and young person should gain at each stage of their education.

School Funding27. So, we will: Target more resources on the most deprived pupils over the next four years, through a new Pupil Premium. In total we will be spending £2.5 billion per year on the Pupil Premium by the end of the Spending Review period.  We will ensure all schools are given the resources and space they need to offer a truly rounded education

Curriculum Development4.27  There is much of value that children need to learn and experience which sits outside the traditional subject disciplines – the languages, sciences, humanities and mathematics which make up national curricula across the globe. So we will ensure there is space in the school day, and resources for school leaders, to guarantee a truly rounded education for all.

4.28 Children need access to high-quality physical education, so we will ensure the requirement to provide PE in all maintained schools is retained and we will provide new support to encourage a much wider take up of competitive team sports. With only one child in five regularly taking part in competitive activities against another school, we need a new approach to help entrench the character- building qualities of team sport

4.29 Children need high-quality sex and relationships education so they can make wise and informed choices. We will work with teachers, parents, faith groups and campaign groups, such as Stonewall to make sure sex and relationships education encompasses an understanding of the ways in which humans love each other and stresses the importance of respecting individual autonomy.

4.30 Children can benefit enormously from high-quality Personal Social Health and Economic (PSHE) education.  Good PSHE supports individual young people to make safe and informed choices. It can help tackle public health issues such as substance misuse and support young people with the financial decisions they must make. We will conduct an internal review to determine how we can support schools to improve the quality of all PSHE teaching, including giving teachers the flexibility to use their judgement about how best to deliver PSHE education.

The Importance of Teaching 4.31 Children should expect to be given a rich menu of cultural experiences. So we have commissioned Darren Henley to explore how we can improve music education and have more children learning to play an instrument. The Henley Review will also inform our broader approach to cultural education. We will support access to live theatre, encourage the appreciation of the visual and plastic arts and work with our great museums and libraries to support their educational mission.  We will incentivise schools to work together to raise standards, especially for disadvantaged pupils

Funding 7.12 We also believe that it is often effective to incentivise improvement and innovative ideas, rather than to mandate a uniform approach. We have already announced our plans to establish a new Education Endowment Fund to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils in underperforming schools. We will put £110m into the fund, which will run throughout the course of the next spending period and beyond. The fund aims to encourage bold and innovative approaches, inviting applications from schools, local authorities, and others. All funded ideas will be evaluated rigorously and shared widely.

7.13 We will also establish a new collaboration incentive worth £35m each year. This will financially reward schools which support weaker schools to demonstrably improve their performance while also improving their own. The fund will incentivise improvements in attainment overall, improvements in progression and narrowing of the attainment gap between deprived pupils and others.  We will make sure that schools can find suitable improvement support

7.14 In a much more autonomous system, schools will be responsible for setting their own priorities and deciding how best to meet them. As the National Strategies and other field forces come to an end, we will support a new market of school improvement services with a much wider range of providers and services available for schools to choose from. We will work with a growing number of providers to make it easier for head teachers and teachers to find out about improvement services on offer as well as making high quality research, good practice and free resources easily available.

In February the activities will be hosted by Bradfields School in Gillingham.  The pupils will have work opportunities in the following areas:

Beauty, Jewellery Making, Dance, Face Painting and theatre make-up and Circus Skills.  These activities were chosed by the young people as areas they would like to explore.

Case Kent will be funding activities in Faversham, Ashford, Folkestone, Isle of Sheppey and Sandwich. 

Case Kent’s activities in February will be on Thursday 24th February in Ashford and Dover.  Tamara Wilder one of our Drama Partners will be leading a fun workshop for disabled young people.  The Ashford workshop will be at the Ray Allan Children’s Centre from 9.30am until 12noon and at the Buckland and Whitfield Children’s Centre at 2pm in Dover.

For full details please download the leaflet below;

www.kdaat.co.uk

Video footage of the Maidstone Hidden Harm Launch can be viewed on:

Hidden Harm – Rosalind Turner: http://digital.kent.gov.uk/3337/
Hidden Harm – Tim Rhodes: http://digital.kent.gov.uk/3339/
Hidden Harm – Focus Group: http://digital.kent.gov.uk/3341/