%N RR1490
%A Jessica Deighton
%A Abigail Thompson
%A Neil Humphrey
%A Emma Thornton
%A Christopher Knowles
%A Praveetha Patalay
%A Kyann Zhang
%A Sarah Evans-Lacko
%A Daniel Hayes
%A Anna March
%A Rosie Mansfield
%A Joao Santos
%A Emre Deniz
%A Paul Stallard
%A Emma Ashworth
%A Bettina Moltrecht
%A Kirsty Nisbet
%A Emily Stapley
%A Carla Mason
%A Jessica Stepanous
%A Jan Rasmus Boehnke
%T Effectiveness of school mental health
and wellbeing promotion: Universal approaches in English
primary and secondary schools
%D 2025
%L discovery10205397
%I Department for Education
%O Copyright © Department for Education copyright 2025.
This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0,
except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit
nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3.
%X Funded by the Department for Education, Education for Wellbeing was one of England's
largest research programmes for school-based mental health interventions. The aim of
the programme was to evaluate pioneering ways of supporting the mental wellbeing of
pupils.
The programme was split into two trials: AWARE (Approaches for Wellbeing and Mental
Health Literacy: Research in Education), tested in secondary school settings, and
INSPIRE (Interventions in Schools for Promoting Wellbeing: Research in Education),
tested in both primary and secondary school settings.
This briefing focuses on the results for the INSPIRE trial which explored three initiatives
either based around techniques to support mental wellbeing, or approaches to support
and encourage help-seeking and allied strategies. These initiatives were delivered in
years 4 and 5 in primary schools and 7 and 8 in secondary schools. These approaches
were developed specifically for the study and had not been trialled previously. These
were: Mindfulness-Based Exercises; Relaxation Techniques and Strategies for Safety
and Wellbeing (an 8-lesson mental health literacy programme). Specifically the trial explored the impact of these interventions in the short and longer term on children and
young people’s self-reported emotional difficulties and intentions to seek help in future if
experiencing mental health problems (intended help-seeking). The trial was conducted
with 20,489 pupils across 213 schools.
%C London, UK