King's College London

Three quarters of mental health conditions are apparent by age 24, with evidence of a rise in certain conditions since the pandemic in adolescents and young people. Children and young people’s unmet mental health needs are at their highest and are severely overrepresented in deprived areas. In the last decade, the UK government has made policy commitments to enhance children and young people’s mental health.

The objective of this challenge area is to develop mental health intelligence systems to support school leaders, local decision-makers, and central government in planning and evaluating equitable mental health preventative interventions in children and young people.

Using existing innovative linked whole-country national pupil-level data between education and health in England and in Wales, we will examine patterns of children and young people’s mental health service activity, to produce evidence about ‘known’ mental health needs. We will help to identify schools with the highest discrepancies between reported-need and access to services.

We will also use the data frameworks developed to examine whether children and young people’s preventative programmes are fairly distributed according to local area and school-level mental health need.

For example, we will examine whether mental health inequities in schools have been impacted by the provision of Mental Health Support Teams, who bear the main responsibility for delivering whole-school mental health prevention programmes in England but will only be available in 50 per cent of secondary schools and 25 per cent of primary schools by 2025. To support universal accessibility, we will investigate how intervention estimates are altered in children and young people who are neurodiverse or racially minoritised.

Collaborators

Forward Thinking Birmingham, Place2Be, STEM4, Department for Education