Research Library

Students who are marginalised based on varying identities, backgrounds and characteristics are highly vulnerable to mental health challenges, but many do not receive appropriate support from healthcare services. This study examines the mental health coping strategies and support needs among marginalised students in the UK.

Despite recent investments in school-based mental health and wellbeing promotion in England, the sustainability of mental health interventions remains a substantial challenge. This article brings together potential solutions to sustaining interventions in schools, drawing on insights from an online roundtable discussion held in July 2022. 

We searched for studies investigating whole-family-interventions for families living with parental mental illness. We identified what these interventions have in common, their effectiveness and how families' experienced them.

Level Up is a novel, UK-based intervention consisting of five online group sessions, straddling the summer holidays, and providing at-risk children and their parents/carers with skills to manage their behaviour, emotions, and relationships to support their transition to secondary school. A prior evaluation of Level Up reported a need to better describe the mechanisms of change. This study therefore evaluated the experiences of children and their parents/carers regarding the facilitators and barriers to engagement and change, and the perceived impact.

Little is known about the clinical characteristics of children and parents affected by intimate partner violence (IPV) presenting in health-care settings. We examined the associations between family adversities, health characteristics, and IPV in children and parents using linked electronic health records (EHRs) from primary and secondary care between 1 year before and 2 years after birth (the first 1000 days). We compared parental health problems in in children and parents with and without recorded IPV. Authors: Syed, S., Gilbert, R., Feder, G., Howe, L., Powell, C., Howarth, E., Deighton, J., Lacey, R.

In light of the dramatic rise in mental health disorders amongst adolescents seen in the past decade across the world, there is an urgent need for robust evidence on what works to combat this trend. This paper provides the first robust evaluation of the impacts on school outcomes of 6-year funding programme (HeadStart) for area-level mental health interventions for adolescents. Exploiting educational administrative data on ten cohorts of state-educated secondary school students, we use the synthetic control method to construct counterfactual outcomes for areas that received the funding. Authors: Cattan, S., Lereya, S. T., Yoon, Y., Gilbert, R., Deighton, D.

This study aimed to explore early adolescents’ lived experiences of a school- and community-based prevention program, including what helps, why, and when. Authors: Stapley, E., Eisenstadt, M., Demkowicz, O., Stock, S., O'neill, A., Deighton, J., & Ungar, M.

We aimed to investigate if HeadStart was effective in ameliorating school outcomes such as absence, exclusion and attainment. We also aimed to explore if synthetic control method was an appropriate methodology to investigate the effectiveness of area level interventions.

This study aims to explore the process of collecting and using cost data from programme implementers’ perspectives, in the context of delivering a prevention and early intervention programme in a real-world setting. Authors: Stapley, E., Herbert, K., Cattan, S., Deighton, J. (2022).