This week’s guest blog comes from Lucy Bailey, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Bounce Forward. Bounce Forward are leading a study to embed evidence-based wellbeing and emotional health lessons in secondary schools. Here, Lucy outlines the process of delivery and reflects on the research outcomes and interesting findings.
A recent blog by The Children’s Society on their Good Childhood report showed reductions in happiness over time for young people in the UK. Many of the issues identified as influencing factors identified in the report are problems that can be influenced by schools. As the key findings from the Origins of Happiness highlight: schools make as much difference to emotional health and behaviour as to academic achievement. Schools and individual teachers have a huge effect on the happiness of children. This is explored in this study, the biggest of its kind, led by Bounce Forward, the London School of Economics and funded by the Education Endowment Foundation.
Good schools have already explored ways to teach wellbeing. The importance of learning about wellbeing and mental health in schools has been reinforced by the pending statutory requirement to teach Health Education along with Ofsted’s new framework. This focuses on the importance of personal development, including resilience, within a curriculum that meets the needs of students.
We have developed an evidence-informed wellbeing curriculum for schools. The raw content was gathered from a project funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, that searched internationally for the best, well-tested materials.
The four-year Healthy Minds curriculum consists of 113 lessons for year 7-10 students. The thread that binds the teaching and learning is resilience skills that are taught explicitly through 26 individual lessons or implicitly through the teaching of other topics.
Data was collected in Year Seven as a baseline, in Year Nine and again and at the end of Year 10. The results were measured against a control group of students who were taught Personal, Social, Health and Economic lessons ‘as usual’. The health and behaviour results show percentage gains across all outcomes. Academic outcomes will be published in September 2020.
At the mid-way point we see a negative effect on internalising behaviour (how young people are feeling inside) and this is interesting. Healthy Minds encourages young people to explore and understand positive and negative emotions as natural and not necessarily bad. So, the likelihood is that students were able to recognise when they were feeling sad, or anxious increases. What they did about it (externalising behaviour) is shown as having a positive effect at the mid-way point.
To find out more
Download the evidence
Sign up to receive resources, insights and evidence as they are published.
Download the evidence
