About CYP IAPT

The Children and Young People's (CYP) IAPT Project is a Service Transformation Project for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) working in targeted and specialist settings (Tiers 2 and 3), including both the statutory and third sector.  

The focus of CYP IAPT is to create change by  

  • involving children, young people and parents through participation
  • embedding evidence-based practice across services through training
  • creating local strategies to improve access
  • making sure that the whole service, not just the trainee therapists, use session by session outcome monitoring
  • supporting dynamic service leadership
  • making use of new technology.

In terms of the involvement of children and young people, the CYP IAPT programme has some clear messages for mental health services:

  • Children and young people's participation is critical to the success of CYP IAPT.  There need to be clear structures and systems in place to enable children and young people be able to contribute in a meaningful way to how services are designed, delivered and monitored.
  • Services involved in the IAPT programme must all be committed to hearing the views of children, young people, parents and carers and, crucially, acting on them to make improvements and share good practice.
  • Services will start using ‘session by session’ monitoring which means they will be asking children and young people using services to feed back about every session they come to. This will help guide the therapy in the right direction – so that it is as useful as it can be.  Children and young people are behind this and really value this approach.
  • It’s important for there to be choice about what therapies are available to children, young people and their families.

Three large ‘collaboratives’ have already been chosen and are working towards the goals set by the Department of Health. The collaboratives consist of a variety of people including the NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), universities and voluntary agencies (charities).

The collaboratives cover a large area already, and will grow as time goes on so that more people can benefit and learn from the programme. Significant training will be given to staff to help them improve the way they work and also to check how well it’s going with children and young people.

YoungMinds is supporting this work across the country, and learning from local children and young people who want to be involved and have a say about their mental health services. You can find out more about young people's participation in the programme and the nine CYP IAPT participation priorities here.

You can get more information about Children and Young People’s IAPT programme directly from the NHS website.

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