By Kenny Graham, Head of Education, Falkland House School

ON Thursday Derek Mackay will deliver a speech that sets out the Scottish Government’s spending plans for the next financial year. Speculation about what he will say has been rife.

Will he raise income tax for the wealthiest? Will he mirror his UK Government counterpart and provide help for first-time buyers? Will he cut the local government budget by three per cent?

An issue that has also been top of the agenda and will, it is to be hoped, play a key part in the speech is that of mental health.

In recent years there have been several excellent campaigns aimed at normalising mental health issues and these have helped to alter deep-rooted predispositions and drive our society forward to the ultimate goal of parity of esteem: that mental health is treated the same as physical health, with the same openness, investment and understanding.

In recent years Scotland has made some progress. We have a 10-year mental health strategy and a dedicated minister for mental health, who last week announced £95,000 to establish the Youth Commission on Mental Health Services plus a partnership between the Scottish Government, Young Scot and the Scottish Association for Mental Health, which is to be led by young people.

They will conduct an in-depth study into child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), which has experienced surging demand in recent years.

With all of this increased attention and conversation around mental health, you might be surprised to learn that a mere 0.48 per cent of the total NHS Scotland budget is spent on CAMHS, amounting to some £54 million a year. Meanwhile, only 6.34 per cent of the overall mental health budget is spent on CAMHS.

This is despite the fact that 50 per cent of mental health problems are established by the age of 14 and 75 per cent by the age of 24. Research also indicates that 10 per cent of children and young people (aged five to 16) have a clinically diagnosable mental health problem: around three in every classroom.

The latest waiting time figures for access to CAMHS indicate that NHS Scotland failed to meet the Scottish Government 18-week waiting time target during the quarter from April to June this year. It is equally concerning that these figures revealed 37 children and young people had been waiting more than a year to be seen. Four-and-a-half months are a long time to wait for treatment when many young people have reached crisis point. To wait more than a year is unacceptable.

It is for these reasons and a host of others that the Scottish Children’s Services Coalition, of which I am a member, has called on Derek Mackay to triple NHS Scotland spending on mental health services for children and young people by delivering a budget for mental health.

This would see Scotland simply matching the proportion of the NHS budget spent on CAMHS in England and would equate to an extra £100m a year; a small price to pay to ensure the mental wellbeing of the next generation.

The coalition has also called for a renewed focus on prevention and early intervention. This includes greater school-based counselling services, on-demand counselling services in GP surgeries, training of school staff and greater community support more generally, all of which would help to reduce the need for referral to under-pressure specialist CAMHS.

The Scottish Government must use this budget to realise its ambitions of achieving a sea change in mental health but that means putting the necessary resourcing in place to achieve this goal.