Research Library

From a review of the diverse work to engage children and young people in evaluation that has taken place in the six HeadStart Partnerships, it has been possible to identify key challenges and practices that have helped overcome them (2020).

This case study looks at how HeadStart Kernow raised awareness of the WMF and began to embed the use of WMF data across the system. Challenges they encountered include limited awareness of WMF and its potential locally, and issues around the accessibility of the data (2019).

Headstart Newham provide school and community based interventions for young people with emerging mental health needs. The service collects pre and post intervention surveys to measure young people’s self-rated mental health as well as key risk and protective factors for mental health outcomes. HeadStart Newham worked to develop a user friendly report for schools and community providers to see the progress of their young people following interventions (2019).

HeadStart areas have been successful in collecting a huge volume of data about student wellbeing using questionnaires. This is key to our aim to build evidence about what works and what doesn’t, and to share learning to benefit young people in future. Achieving this is no mean feat. This case study shares our learning about how to get a good response rate when using surveys to measure wellbeing in schools (2018).

The aim of this review was to systematically identify the behavioural change techniques (BCTs) underpinning anorexia nervosa apps for young people. BCTs refer to the “common language” used by researchers to determine the triggers of behaviour change. Authors: Chiang, CP., Hayes, D., Panagiotopoulou, E. (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).

The findings suggest a need for caution in using the strengths and difficulties questionnaire as a self-report measure for children below the age of 13, and highlight considerations of readability in measure development, selection and interpretation. Authors: Patalay, P., Hayes, D., & Wolpert, M. (2018).

This paper presents an example of the use of a FUPS dataset in the complex system of child mental healthcare. The paper explores the use of this FUPS dataset to support meaningful dialogue between key stakeholders, including service providers, funders and users, in relation to outcomes of services. The term ‘FUPS’ is proposed to describe these flawed, uncertain, proximate and sparse datasets. Authors: Wolpert, M., Rutter, H. (2018).

There is a growing concern about the mental health of children and young people (CYP) in the UK, with increasing demand for counselling services, admissions for self-harm and referrals to mental health services. We investigated whether there have been similar recent trends in selected mental health outcomes among CYP in national health surveys from England, Scotland and Wales. Authors: Pitchforth, J., Fahy, K., Ford, T., Wolpert, M., Viner, R. M., & Hargreaves, D. S. (2018).