Research Library

An accessible resource on what we know about mental health.

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.

The primary challenges staff identified in supporting mental health and wellbeing varied across the timepoints. They include issues relating to logistics, the demand for support and the availability of support.

Why focus on children’s mental health at this time? What has the impact been on young people’s mental wellbeing? How can we best support children and young people’s mental health at this time?