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Waiting times for children and young people's mental health services, 2023-24

This report presents statistics for children and young people accessing secondary mental health, learning disabilities and autism services in England.
Date published:
25 February 2025

Request received

Request received from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner about children and young people accessing secondary mental health, learning disabilities and autism services in England.

Our response

Following a request from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, this report presents statistics on:

1. The time between referral and first contact and referral and second contact for children and young people accessing secondary mental health, learning disabilities and autism services in England. Data is available at national and Integrated Care Board (ICB) geographies. The data also includes waiting times by referral source, and demographic breakdowns of referral source and referral reasons. A contact is counted as either a direct contact with the child, young person or family member or carer by the mode face to face, telephone, or video call, or an indirect contact between professionals. Data is presented for all eligible direct and indirect contacts, and by direct contacts only.  

2. The number of children and young people with a suspected eating disorder seen within 1 week and 4 weeks. Data is presented at national and ICB.

3. The number of children and young people accessing services in 2018-2019 to 2023-2024. Data is presented at national and ICB.

Data at sub national level is suppressed for values less than 5 and rounded to the nearest 5 otherwise.

Download the data

Last edited: 25 February 2025 8:37 am