Research Library

This briefing aims to describe an approach to monitoring and evaluating children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing in schools and colleges, as a means to provide better support. The IDEA (Intervention description, Design, Evaluation implementation, Analysis and reporting) approach is described, which gives practical steps to the development of approaches to evaluating support for mental health and wellbeing delivered in educational settings. Three evaluations that have adopted this approach are also summarised.

This document is designed to inspire and support education providers to engage students with wellbeing survey findings. It introduces approaches to sharing complex information with students in an accessible way and to gathering their responses. The insights gained can help improve education providers’ understanding of the findings. We have provided practice examples from sessions we ran using findings from the Wellbeing Measurement Framework (WMF) student wellbeing survey but the principles and practical guidance apply to findings from any student wellbeing survey.

This briefing draws on learning emerging from research led by the Evidence Based Practice Unit in collaboration with the Child Outcomes Research Consortium, The University of Manchester and Common Room. The Mercers’ Company funded the research. The Mercers’ Company is the Premier Livery Company of the City of London. Authors: Deighton, J., Stapley, E., Lereya, T., Burrell, K., Atkins, L. (2019).

The dual-factor approach to mental health was employed to explore levels and interrelations of protective factors associated with resilience in a dataset of 30,841 schoolchildren aged 11–14 in England. Authors: Jefferies, P., Fritz, J., Deighton, J., Ungar, M. (2023).

Universal help-seeking interventions in schools to support young people’s mental health have been widely used, but we know little about their initial impact and longer term follow-up. This systematic literature review aims to explore the impact of these types of programmes across different help-seeking constructs. Authors: Hayes, D., Mansfield, R., Mason, C., Santos, J., Moore, A., Boehnke, J., Ashworth, E., Moltrecht, B., Humphrey, N., Stallard, P., Patalay, P., & Deighton, J. (2023).

Here we describe and reflect on the four-day coproduction workshops in which researchers, young people and film-makers coproduced ‘Facing Shadows’, a short animation about depression and therapy. Authors: Dunn, V., O’Keeffe, S., Stapley, E., & Midgley, N. (2018).

This study investigated whether the mean strength of the alliance, as well as its trajectory over time, differed between three equally effective psychological treatments for adolescent depression. Authors: Cirasola, A., Midgley, N., Fonagy, P., IMPACT Consortium, & Martin, P. (2022).

The present study aims to create a typology of depressed adolescents’ experiences regarding their different journeys through the course of psychotherapy in relation to issues of epistemic trust and mistrust over a 2-year period. Authors: Li, E., Midgley, N., Luyten, P., Sprecher, E. A., Campbell, C. (2022).

The systematic review of 77 research studies, including 5,660 participants, shows that therapy in the very early months and years of life can help to prevent and reduce mental health difficulties both for parents and carers and their children by focusing on the crucial relationship between them. Authors: Sleed, M., Li, E., Vainieri, I., & Midgley, N. (2022).