Education settings are important sites for mental health promotion and early intervention. Children and Young People spend more time in school than any other place outside their home, and parents concerned about their child’s mental health turn to teachers for help and advice more often than any other professional group. (Newlove-Delgado et al, 2015).

Background

The Children and Young People’s (CYP) Mental Health Green Paper Programme is an ambitious implementation programme creating mental health support teams (MHSTs) to provide extra capacity for early intervention and work with school/college staff to promote emotional wellbeing across their individual education setting; and funding training to senior mental health leads in schools/colleges to support them in their role.

The Programme has three core functions:

1. To provide direct support to children and young people with mild to moderate mental health issues.
2. To support educational settings to introduce or develop their whole school or college approach to mental health and wellbeing.
3. To give advice to staff in educational settings and liaise with external specialist services to help children and young people to get the right support and stay in education.

Aims and objectives

The specific objectives for this project are to:

1. update the Programme’s theory of change as a framework for the evaluation, and identify and/or develop measures to assess Programme impacts and outcomes;
2. understand service models and ways of working and assess the extent of any learning across sites and over time;
3. assess the relationship between Programme workforce, user outcomes and sustainability;
4. compare activity, user experiences, user outcomes and costs between sites and for different CYP sub-groups;
5. explore whether and how the Programme, and MHSTs specifically, are contributing to the development of whole school/college approaches;
6. identify scope for improvement of Programme delivery to improve effectiveness and cost-effectiveness; and
7. advise how CYP outcome data beyond June 2025 should be collected and analysed at low cost.