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.

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).

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).

The aim of this study was to investigate the association between educational attainment, absenteeism and mental health difficulties while controlling for various child characteristics such as special educational needs and socioeconomic background. Authors: Lereya, S.T., Patel, M., dos Santos, J.P.G.A., and Deighton, J. (2019).

The aim of this study is to examine the amount of the total variance of the subjective well-being (SWB) of psychotherapists from 12 European countries explained by between-country vs. between-person differences regarding its cognitive (life satisfaction) and affective components (positive affect [PA] and negative affect [NA]). Authors: Van Hoy, A., et al. (2022).