Monitoring and evaluating mental health and wellbeing provision in Mercers' associated schools
The aim of the project is to support Mercers' associated schools and colleges to monitor and evaluate their provision for their pupil’s mental health and wellbeing. The impetus for this work arose from a common desire from schools and colleges to learn more about the impact that provision is having upon pupils and students and the school or college. The Pupil Wellbeing Project is a collaboration between CORC, the Evidence Based Practice Unit, UCL and the University of Manchester funded by the Mercers' Company.
The original project engaged 13 schools (primary and secondary) and colleges across England from 2016-19. The key elements of the evaluation project included the implementation of the Wellbeing Measurement Framework (WMF) survey across selected year groups, ongoing support and guidance for participating sites to develop local evaluation work and in-depth evaluation support from the project team for a number of interventions. Alongside this was a commitment to engage sites in regular workshops to share and discuss national learning about children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, to explore what sites are learning locally and to widen the capabilities of sites to evaluate and make sense of the resulting information.
Due to the success of the project, funding has been agreed for three years (2019-2022) which will allow us to expand our work with sites to embed routine evaluation and the meaningful use of associated learning to improve services for pupils' and students' mental health and wellbeing.