The Department has introduced two waiting time standards for children and young people and are on track to meet both of these standards. The first aims for 95% of children (up to 19 years old) with eating disorders to receive treatment within a week for urgent cases and four weeks for routine cases.

81.3% of children and young people’s eating disorder patients started urgent treatment within one week and 80.2% of patients started routine treatment within four weeks in April to June 2018. The second aims for 50% of patients of all ages experiencing a first episode of psychosis to receive treatment within two weeks of referral. Nationally, the National Health Service is exceeding the target, with 76.2% of patients started treatment within two weeks in November 2018.

NHS England publishes guidance for commissioners on waiting times standards for eating disorders and early intervention in psychosis, respectively, available at the following links:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/cyp-eating-disorders-access-waiting-time-standard-comm-guid.pdf

https://www.england.nhs.uk/mentalhealth/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2016/04/eip-guidance.pdf

As set out in the NHS Long Term Plan, NHS England will test approaches that could feasibly deliver four week waiting times for access to NHS support, ahead of introducing new national waiting time standards for all children and young people who need specialist mental health services.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence provide national guidance for recognising and managing psychosis and schizophrenia in children and young people, which aims to improve early recognition of psychosis and schizophrenia so that children and young people can be offered the treatment and care they need to live with the condition. This guidance can be found at the following link:

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg155

The information requested is not held centrally.

The NHS Long Term Plan, published on 7 January 2019, announced that that by 2023/24 an extra 345,000 children and young people aged 0-25 will receive mental health support via National Health Service-funded mental health services and school or college-based Mental Health Support Teams by 2023/24. Under the Long Term Plan, mental health services will continue to receive a growing share of the NHS budget, with funding to grow by at least £2.3 billion a year by 2023/24. For the first time, funding for children and young people’s mental health services will grow faster than both overall NHS funding and total mental health spending. Setting up 24/7 crisis care provision for children, young people and their families is a key priority for the Government in the NHS Long Term Plan. All children and young people experiencing crisis will be able to access crisis care 24 hours a day, seven days a week by 2023/24 via NHS111.

The Government published the first Cross-Government Suicide Prevention Workplan last month which sets out an ambitious programme to reduce suicides, including in children and young people. This can be accessed at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/suicide-prevention-cross-government-plan

In line with the commitments set out in the NHS Long Term Plan, on 20 December the Government announced the first wave of 25 trailblazer sites that will test the plans set out in ‘Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: a green paper’, published in December 2017. These new plans will significantly increase the availability of mental health support to children and young people, including creating new Mental Health Support Teams working in and near schools and colleges to support children and young people with mild to moderate mental health conditions. Mental Health Support Teams will provide brand new services situated in schools and colleges and are intended to offer earlier help and intervention.

Some young people need ongoing support into young adulthood, after they leave children and young people’s mental health services. This point of transition is an important stage for young people, and it is not always easy.

That is why, in January 2015, NHS England published a Model Specification for Transitions from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, to support better transition planning and delivery by local providers. Transition from children and young people’s mental health services has also been included as one of 13 mandatory national indicators in the Commissioning for Quality and Innovation scheme, 2017/19, which offers financial incentives to local areas to encourage improved transition planning for children and young people.

To address issues of transition, some areas have already adopted a mental health service which supports young people from ages 0-25.

This data is not available.

UK officials engage regularly with the South Sudan Young Leaders Forum. We continue to consider how the UK can best lend support to the youth of South Sudan, including the Forum, to contribute to long term peace and stability.

More widely, we have consistently called for the inclusion of a broad range of civil society actors in the High Level Revitalisation Forum (HLRF), including representatives of South Sudanese youth groups. We welcomed the involvement of South Sudanese civil society groups in the first round of the HLRF in December, and encourage their continued inclusion as the process progresses.

The Facts4Life programme is a local training programme in the Gloucestershire area. The Secretary of State has made no assessment of the effect the programme has on health education for young people, and has no current plans to roll out the programme across the United Kingdom.

The department does not record data on the reason for deaths of care leavers.

We are committed to ensuring that care leavers are able to access the mental health support that they need to maintain positive emotional health and well-being. A joint Department of Health and Department for Education Expert Working Group has recently published its proposals for improving the mental health of looked after children and care leavers. A copy of their report is available at: https://www.scie.org.uk/children/care/mental-health/report.

Work to address the Expert Group’s findings is already underway. We are putting a record £1.4 billion into children and young people’s mental health and a further £3 million has been committed to support the recently published Children and Young People’s Mental Health Green Paper. We will now consider the Expert Working Group’s report in the context of the green paper with a view to taking further action.

More broadly, the government published its third progress report on preventing suicide in England in 2016, including the measures it is taking to prevent suicides among children and young people. A copy of the report is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/582117/Suicide_report_2016_A.pdf.

We published our new cross-government strategy, Keep on Caring, in July 2016 which set out the measures we will take to improve the overall outcomes for care leavers. A copy is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/535899/Care-Leaver-Strategy.pdf.

The department publishes data annually on care leavers aged 17 to 21, which includes information on their main activity and whether or not they are in suitable accommodation. The latest data is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2016-to-2017.

The department does not record data on the reason for deaths of care leavers.

We are committed to ensuring that care leavers are able to access the mental health support that they need to maintain positive emotional health and well-being. A joint Department of Health and Department for Education Expert Working Group has recently published its proposals for improving the mental health of looked after children and care leavers. A copy of their report is available at: https://www.scie.org.uk/children/care/mental-health/report.

Work to address the Expert Group’s findings is already underway. We are putting a record £1.4 billion into children and young people’s mental health and a further £3 million has been committed to support the recently published Children and Young People’s Mental Health Green Paper. We will now consider the Expert Working Group’s report in the context of the green paper with a view to taking further action.

More broadly, the government published its third progress report on preventing suicide in England in 2016, including the measures it is taking to prevent suicides among children and young people. A copy of the report is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/582117/Suicide_report_2016_A.pdf.

We published our new cross-government strategy, Keep on Caring, in July 2016 which set out the measures we will take to improve the overall outcomes for care leavers. A copy is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/535899/Care-Leaver-Strategy.pdf.

The department publishes data annually on care leavers aged 17 to 21, which includes information on their main activity and whether or not they are in suitable accommodation. The latest data is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2016-to-2017.

Investment in mental health is increasing, and being spent and this Government has prioritised mental health for children and young people. We are making an additional £1.4 billion available over 2015/16 – 2019/20 which is being used to expand and improve mental health services for children and young people.

The recently published Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision: a Green Paper on 4 December 2017 contains proposals to further increase early intervention and support for children and young people experiencing or at risk of mental health problems. The proposals as set out in the Green Paper on children and young people’s mental health would cost £215 million over the next three years towards the creation of Mental Health Support Teams, piloting a four week waiting time standard and rolling out mental health first aid training to primary schools.

We will make funding available to fund the full cost of the final proposals. We will also provide up to £15-20 million each year from 2019 to cover costs of training Designated Senior Leads in schools and colleges, until all schools and colleges have had the chance to train a lead (we expect total funding to be up to £95 million).

We updated the Cross-Government Suicide Prevention Strategy earlier this year to strengthen delivery of its key areas for action which includes tailoring approaches to improve the mental health of specific groups such as children and young people. We expanded the scope of the Suicide Prevention Strategy to address self-harm as an issue in its own right and one that predominantly affects young people under 25. The Government is investing £1.4 billion up to 2020 to improve mental health services for children and young people, including eating disorders. We remain committed to implementing the vision set out in Future in Mind and we will publish a joint health and education green paper on children and young people’s mental health very soon to set out how we will improve early intervention and prevention of mental ill health across the system.

The Department of Health and Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport continue to work together to address the impact of the internet and social media on the mental health of children and young people to both protect young people online and to harness the benefits online platforms can bring in supporting young people to maintain good mental wellbeing. This includes working with online providers to improve safety and to tackle harmful content online.

We are ensuring that every local area will have a multi-agency suicide prevention plan in place by the end of the year which means all local services, including voluntary and charitable sector organisations, are working together to implement tailored approaches to reducing suicides in their communities. We published guidance to local authorities to set out how local suicide prevention plans should drive national policy locally which includes addressing the key areas for action in the national strategy.

We continue to fund, in partnership with the Samaritans, the National Suicide Prevention Alliance which brings together a wide range of suicide prevention organisations in the voluntary and charitable sector to support delivery of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy. The Alliance includes organisations that work specifically with children and young people to prevention suicide and self-harm.

Departmental Ministers meet and work with a wide range of organisations across public health, the NHS and social care to progress the ambition to reduce the number of suicides in England by 10% by 2020/21. My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health recently spoke at the launch of the Zero Suicide Alliance which is a partnership between Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust and organisations in the voluntary and charitable sector to raise suicide prevention awareness across the system and aims to train 1 million people in suicide prevention.

We have received no reports on the abduction of young people in Darfur for the purposes of militia recruitment or for body parts for medical purposes.

The UK remains concerned by the situation in Darfur, and whilst we have seen a welcome reduction in armed conflict between government forces and armed movements in recent months, the security and humanitarian situation remains fragile. We regularly discuss the situation in Darfur with the Government of Sudan, most recently on 16 October during our bilateral Strategic Dialogue, and urge them to continue to improve humanitarian access and to reach an agreement on a permanent cessation of hostilities.