This was a milestone year for the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, giving us the opportunity to reflect on our work and challenge ourselves going forward.
15th Anniversary
2025 was the 15th anniversary of the Coalition and in October we had the opportunity to bring together members to celebrate.
At an event hosted by DLA Piper co-designed and co-chaired by young people we spent the first half of the day looking at some of the progress we have made since our foundation. It was positive to reflect on some of the progress we had made and the growth of the Coalition standing at now over 400 members. However, as we looked back it was clear mental health is still being overlooked, especially children and young people’s Mental Health, with more to be done to centre the views and needs of children and young people.
Following a keynote address from the Minister for Mental Health, Baroness Merron, we heard first hand from young people about the ever-increasing pressures they are facing and how too often they are being failed by a lack of appropriate support. As well as fighting for more investment and better services, it was clear the Coalition also needs to be a strong voice in face of growing narratives like overdiagnosis and to challenge the drivers of poor mental health, including poverty, racism, online harms and stresses and a lack of creative opportunities in school.
The day highlighted the real challenge young people are facing but also showed the number of people doing amazing work across the sector and the Coalition.
Influencing Change
The anniversary also gave us time to take stock on the work we have done this year.
In 2025, the Coalition was busy influencing key stakeholders to prioritise children’s mental health. A key part of this was the Future Minds Campaign. We joined forces with Centre for Mental Health, the Centre for Young Lives, and YoungMinds, with the support of the Prudence Trust – to call on the Government to deliver urgent reform and investment. As part of this campaign, we also attended Labour Party Conference, where a panel of young experts by experience spoke at a fringe event to highlight the campaign.
While our report and campaigning made a strong case for investment, it has come in a challenging time. Children are still waiting for too long for support and regularly presenting in crisis. Meanwhile, the Government redefining the Mental Health Investment will have implications for services, and narratives around overdiagnosis have crept further into the media and policy discussions.
This campaign still has a long way to go, but even in this challenging environment we did see some positive traction. For example, our call to recommissioning of children and young people’s mental health prevalence survey to better understand the support young people need, being confirmed in the Government’s Youth Strategy.
This Strategy also showed we made some progress on our calls to roll out early support hubs. Alongside our #FundtheHubs campaign partners (Centre for Mental Health, Youth Access, YoungMinds, Mind, The Children’s Society, Black Thrive Global and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy), we have regularly called for a national network of early support hubs to ensure that children and young people receive timely mental health and wellbeing support. Setting out a Blueprint showing how we can grow the nationwide network of Young Futures hubs.
While it is still unclear if the Youth Future Hubs rollout confirmed in the Youth Strategy will reflect our recommendations it was positive to see the announcement. And we will continue to work with Government to ensure that these hubs provide direct support from a qualified mental health professional open for all young people.
Mental Health Bill
One of the biggest legislative changes this year was the updating of the Mental Health Act.
The Coalition was also able to have a strong influence on the Bill, helping table amendments to clarify the Capacity Assessment process and the Nominated Persons changes applies to Children and Young People, as well as commitments to end treating children in appropriate settings in adult wards or far away from home. Even if the Government did not meet us where we wanted during the legislative process, they did make commitments to tackle these problems and were keen to involve us going forward.
This year was an important opportunity to reflect and celebrate, but it also outlined the crisis young people facing and the progress that desperately needs to be made, because we cannot afford to be having these same discussions at our next anniversary.
