01 / WHAT TAMHS WASThe programme, in plain English.
Between 2010 and 2011, the Department for Education funded a national pilot called Targeted Mental Health in Schools. In Barking & Dagenham, NELFT NHS Foundation Trust ran the programme with Miguel Estrada as Clinical Lead — placing CAMHS clinicians directly alongside SENCOs, teachers and families in twenty primary and secondary schools.01
It was a simple idea, ruthlessly applied: if a child’s support happens across three settings, the three settings have to share a plan. Clinicians stopped treating schools as referrers and started treating them as co-authors of care. Parents were given a voice in the record, not just the waiting room.
02 / OUTCOMES AT NELFTWhat the year-one report found.
At the close of the 2010–2011 academic year, NELFT published an internal annual report measuring pupil outcomes before and after the coordinated-care model was introduced.02 Across children with neurodevelopmental needs in the programme, the report recorded three improvements:
We are careful with these figures. They come from a single NHS trust, a single academic year, and a model operated by clinicians working in close physical proximity to the schools they served. We do not present them as peer-reviewed trial outcomes, and we never quote them without attribution.
“The gap was never information. The gap was coordination.”Miguel Estrada — Clinical Lead, NELFT 2010–2011
03 / THE MECHANISMCoordination, not AI.
Our position is that the benefit of TaMHS did not come from any single clinical intervention — it came from the moment three adults began looking at the same record. The peer-reviewed literature on multi-agency care for children with neurodevelopmental needs supports this.030405
Rconnected is not an algorithm that diagnoses or prescribes. It is an electronic spine for the coordinated-care methodology TaMHS proved works: a shared plan, a shared record, and structured clinical tools that schools and families can contribute to without clinical training.
04 / PEER-REVIEWED EVIDENCEThe coordinated-care literature.
Beyond the NELFT report, a body of peer-reviewed research supports multi-agency and school-embedded approaches for children with ADHD, ASD and broader neurodevelopmental needs. We select sources with clear methodology, UK relevance, and consistent effect direction.
Sheridan et al. (2019) demonstrated that parent–teacher collaboration protocols produce measurable behavioural gains in children with ADHD.03 Pfiffner and colleagues (2016, 2018) showed that the Collaborative Life Skills programme — a cross-setting intervention with structural similarities to TaMHS — improves classroom functioning and home behaviour.0406 Cheng et al. (2023) synthesised the recent literature on integrated care for childhood neurodevelopmental conditions.05 Iznardo et al. (2020) examined teacher-led daily report cards as a bridge between home and school.07
05 / WHAT RCONNECTED DIGITISESFrom clipboard to spine.
The TaMHS methodology used paper plans, weekly meetings, and co-located clinicians. Rconnected preserves the methodology and replaces the infrastructure: a shared care plan visible to family, school and CAMHS; behaviour logging in seconds; functional analysis and risk tools built to NHS standards; and a DCB0129/0160-aligned clinical safety case that travels with the product.
06 / WHAT WE ARE NOT CLAIMINGHonest boundaries.
Rconnected has not yet been evaluated as a product in a peer-reviewed trial. Our pilot programme in 2026 is designed to produce that evaluation. We do not claim the TaMHS outcomes will reproduce exactly through software — we claim the methodology is sound, the literature supports the mechanism, and the opportunity is to give every school in the UK access to a model that currently requires a co-located NHS trust to run.