About BOND
The Government’s new Mental Health Strategy emphasises the crucial importance of early intervention in emerging emotional and mental health problems for children and young people.
Early intervention has been shown to achieve improved outcomes for children, families and wider society such as increased learning and educational attainment, better physical health, improved long-term mental health and reduced health and social care costs.
Finding appropriate help when experiencing emotional distress or mental health problems can be very confusing and intimidating.
Voluntary and community organisations have an important role to play in providing effective, high quality early intervention services as they are local, flexible, trusted, informal and friendly.
To provide a vital resource for schools, local authorities and the NHS and as part of the Government’s policy on local determination of priorities, a strengthened voice for service users and the increased role of the VCS, the Department of Education is supporting a two-year sector-led programme which will build the capacity of VCSOs to deliver early intervention mental health support to children and young people called BOND – Better Outcomes, New Delivery.
BOND will support the standard and range of early intervention delivery and the purchasing/commissioning processes. This will expand choice and provision of timely and efficient mental health services for children and young people throughout the sector.
What will the programme do?
The BOND programme includes:
- Gathering and sharing examples of what works.
- Working intensively with voluntary and community sector organisations and commissioners in five pilot areas across the country to develop practical tools and methods to build the capacity of VCSOs to deliver more mental health services.
- Learning from the pilots nationally, via training and information exchange.
- Providing targeted support to BME organisations and providers of services to the most vulnerable children and young people, including looked after children and those at risk of offending.
One of the first phases of the project is a series of Best practice exchanges, which will take place in March 2012.
Who is delivering the programme?
The programme will be delivered by the BOND Consortium (Better Outcomes, New Delivery) led by YoungMinds and made up of national organisations and individuals with proven experience and a strong track record in children and young people’s mental health, organisational capacity building and commissioning development.
The BOND Consortium members include: Youth Access and Place2Be who bring a strong track record of VCS delivery of mental health services in the community and in schools across England, with evidence-based models of effective practice and outcomes, quality assurance, networking and commissioning.
The Mental Health Foundation and EBPU (Evidence Based Practice Unit) provide unrivalled expertise in research on the provision of mental health services, data collection, quality standards, outcomes for CAMHS, and accreditation.
FPM brings a ten-year history and proven record of capacity building across VCS organisations working with children and young people.
YoungMinds has also assembled a specialist team of CAMHS commissioning experts including Lisa Williams and The Rees Consultancy and online CAMHS support providers Cernis.
Contact BOND (Better Outcomes, New Delivery)
- e: bond@youngminds.org.uk
- t: 020 7089 5056