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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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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Emma Sullivan summarises a cross-sectional observational study investigating associations between school smartphone policies and mental wellbeing in young people.
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Sofiia Kornatska reviews a non-randomised trial exploring a dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) based universal intervention on adolescent social and emotional well-being in Australian schools.
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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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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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In her latest blog, Ariadna Albajara Saenz summarises a recent paper reporting on two pilot trials exploring partnerships between schools and mental health services to test the utilisation and acceptability of specialist liaison and teacher skills training.
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Chris Fielding summarises a Welsh cohort study which finds that neurodevelopmental and mental disorders are linked to school absenteeism and exclusion.
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Lucinda Powell summarises a review which finds little evidence to support the use of peer mentoring in schools to improve mental wellbeing.
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In his debut blog, Chris Fielding reviews a study which uses baseline data from the MYRIAD study, and concludes that the “direct influence of schools on mental health seems to be small”.
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