Schools spend the equivalent of three full-time staff managing phone use, whether or not students are allowed to have phones in school. This new study asks if banning smartphones actually improves pupils’ wellbeing or saves money for schools.
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13% of vapes confiscated from English schools contained synthetic cannabinoids mis-sold as THC. Refillable vapes and social media platforms enable this dangerous trend.
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The Connected Belonging model argues that schools should support young people’s relationships to their community, culture and peers, rather than focusing on individual skills like “grit” and resilience. Should centre identity and relationships in our work with young people?
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With classroom mental health programmes on the rise, this review raises an important question: are we doing more harm than good? The evidence suggests universal interventions may not be right for everyone.
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The Education for Wellbeing programme, funded by the Department for Education, was one of England’s largest school-based mental health research initiatives. It included two major trials (AWARE and INSPIRE) testing universal mental health approaches in schools between 2018 and 2024. What did these big studies really find?
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Monika Raniti and Jennifer Dam summarise a recent narrative systematic review, which suggests that school connectedness can help protect against suicidality, but the research points to it being more protective of suicidal ideation than suicide attempts.
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Filip Marzecki summarises a large-scale systematic review and meta-analysis investigating prevalence and odds of bullying involvement in young people with mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions.
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Matthias Schwannauer explores the BESST cluster randomised controlled trial, which is out today in The Lancet Psychiatry. BESST stands for Brief Educational Workshops in Secondary Schools Trial.
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In her debut blog, Tamara Pemovska summarises Lewis et al.’s 2023 paper on the pros and cons of creative qualitative research methods with autistic pupils.
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Lucinda Powell reflects on an early evaluation of the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Trailblazer programme, which looked at the first 25 ‘Trailblazer’ sites implementing mental health support teams in schools.
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