Future Minds: mid-term report card

Future Minds’s mid-parliament report card is an assessment of the Government’s progress over the past two years in improving the mental health of children and young people.

The scale of the problem is stark. The decline in children and young people’s mental health is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Around one in five young people aged 8 to 25 now has a diagnosable common mental health problem, such as anxiety and depression, but too many face long waits for care, with early support often unavailable or insufficient.

Rising need and the pressure on services hasn’t eased since the general election: between July 2024 and June 2026, mental health services in England received 2.7 million referrals for children and young people, including 157,000 made in crisis.

Today’s report estimates that, without significant intervention, the picture will be worse by the end of this Parliament: 3.9 million more referrals by August 2029, more than 1.1 million children whose referral may never lead to treatment, while children and young people could collectively spend more than 0.5bn days on waiting lists – equivalent to more than 1.3m years.

We recognise however that there has been some progress in recent years: the expansion of Mental Health Support Teams, reform of the Mental Health Act, and new initiatives like Young Futures Hubs, DWP Youth Hubs and Early Support Hubs. However, more significant progress continues to be undermined by implementation issues and underfunding – with children and young people’s mental health spending making up only 1% of the NHS budget. 

Taken together, we’ve rated the Government’s overall progress so far:
REQUIRES URGENT IMPROVEMENT.

We are at a key moment of opportunity. This report is calling on the Government to commit to four things as urgent priorities: 

1. Protect and invest in children and young people’s mental health support through a ‘triple-protect guarantee’ on spending, raising investment every year by whichever is highest – inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%.
2. Make children and young people’s mental health a national priority: embed children and young people’s mental health across government, with the mental health strategy delivering evidence-based interventions to drive prevention, not just treatment.
3. Enforce the mandatory access and waiting time standards for mental health care proposed by NHS England to close the treatment gap for children and young people’s mental health
4. Deliver the manifesto commitment to provide open-access mental health support through Early Support Hubs in every community up to the age of 25.