My Story and Me
Funder: The first phase of this project was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Public Health Research programme (NIHR135162).
Lead: Julian Edbrooke-Childs
About: My Story and Me is a storytelling intervention to help young women and girls aged 12–24 to understand and talk about their mental health. We use the terms ‘girl’ and ‘young woman’ inclusively. Those who are non-binary and feel the topic is relevant are also encouraged to get involved.
Participants are asked to create a five-minute story on three topics: Who am I? What is my mental health story? How do I like my mental health to be supported?
We are creating a platform where young women and girls can view the videos and create their own video.
National Autism Training Programme
Funder: NHS England
Duration: Autumn 2022 - Summer 2025
Lead: Jessica Deighton
Collaborators: AT-Autism
About: Anna Freud and AT-Autism have joined forces to develop an autism train the trainer programme for NHS England.
The National Autism Trainer Programme (NATP) will be delivered to 4,800 trainers over three years. The course is aimed at mental health professionals, and other relevant staff, who currently work or may work with diagnosed or undiagnosed autistic people from the following settings:
The training programme is co-designed, co-produced and co-delivered with autistic people and promotes an experience-sensitive, trauma-informed approach.
EBPU are working with POD to conduct a formative evaluation to support the development and delivery of this programme.
You can find out more about the project on the NATP website page.
Schools and Colleges Early Support Service
Funder: The Julia and Hans Rausing Trust, Garfield Weston Foundation, The Prudence Trust, Westminster Foundation.
Duration: 2020 - Ongoing
Lead: Hannah Woods (Head of Service), Melissa Cortina (Head of Evaluation)
About: The Schools and Colleges Early Support Service is an online whole-school emotional wellbeing offer from Anna Freud, which takes a whole-school approach to mental health. The Service is for young people aged 11-25 experiencing mild to moderate mental health difficulties, like anxiety and low mood, and the trusted adults around them. For young people, it comprises 6-8 weekly sessions (11-25 years old), single session 1:1 consultations (16-25 year olds), and on-demand psychoeducation webinars. School staff are offered termly 1:1 consultations and on-demand psychoeducation webinar. Parents and carers are offered single 1:1 consultations and live and on-demand webinars.
Ongoing evaluation has been embedded into the programme to monitor feedback, change and continually improve the service. Key outcomes for young people include reduced anxiety and depression symptoms, improved wellbeing, and progress on Goal-Based Outcomes.
Find out more on the Anna Freud website page.
Youth Intensive Psychological Practitioner
Funder: NHS England
Duration: December 2022-May 2024
Lead: Julian Edbrooke-Childs, Emily Stapley
About: The project evaluates the effectiveness of a recently created Youth Intensive Psychological Practitioner (YIPP) role being piloted in 18 NHS Trusts. The role is intended to support high intensity mental health services supporting young people with the highest mental health need.
Anna Freud has been commissioned to undertake an independent evaluation of the YIPP pilot.
#BeeWell
Duration: 2021 - ongoing
EBPU Lead: Jessica Deighton
Collaborators: University of Manchester (Project Lead), Gregson Family Foundation
Project Partners: Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton Councils
About: #BeeWell was co-founded by The University of Manchester, The Gregson Family Foundation and Anna Freud in 2019, and developed in partnership with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. In 2023 #BeeWell expanded into Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth, and Southampton.
Central to the programme is a survey, created collaboratively with 350 young people from 30 schools and a team of mental health and wellbeing experts. The young participants played a crucial role in designing the survey to ensure it reflected what truly mattered to them.
The #BeeWell findings are then shared with schools and coalition partners in order to understand priorities and respond accordingly, with our CORC team meeting with school representatives and young people to discuss the findings in detail.
For more information please visit the #BeeWell website.
Image-Based Measures
Funder: Medical Research Council
Duration: September 2023 - November 2024
Lead: Julian Edbrooke-Childs
About: We know how difficult it can be for children and young people to express their feelings, and its importance in supporting their mental health. Currently, the main way we find out how young people are doing and feeling is with text-based questionnaires. We know these don’t work for everyone. So, we want to create a different type of questionnaire, that uses images and pictures rather than text.
Text-based questionnaires are particularly challenging for certain groups of people, such as minoritised ethnic groups, neurodivergent people, people with special educational needs, and people with English as an additional language. This is because existing text-based measure have often not been designed with people from these groups. We want to hear from different people, including people from these groups. This project will result in the creation of a co-produced image-based questionnaire/measure working with young people and researchers.
More Good Days at School
Funder: Youth Endowment Fund and Home Office
Duration: 2023 - December 2025
Lead: Julian Edbrooke-Childs
About: Mainstream secondary schools in England are taking part in our More Good Days at School (MGDAS) study, co-funded by the Youth Endowment Fund and the Home Office.
This national research study, a collaboration between Anna Freud, Knowledge Change Action, Warren Larkin Associates and Youth Endowment Fund is a randomised controlled trial to look at how schools can support young people’s wellbeing, working with mainstream secondary schools to identify whether those staff informed and trained to respond to trauma are able to better support students’ mental health and wellbeing.
Find out more about the project on the KCA website.
Your Choice
Funder: Youth Endowment Fund
Duration: 2023 - August 2025
Lead: Julian Edbrooke-Childs
About: Anna Freud and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have partnered to evaluate the Your Choice programme, which aims to reduce violence for at-risk 11- to 18-year-olds across London. Your Choice, developed by London Innovation and Improvement Alliance (LIIA), supported by London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) involves young people meeting with their practitioners three times per week for twelve weeks and is based on CBT techniques.
More information about Your Choice can be found on the Your Choice website page.
More information about the evaluation can also be found on the evaluation website page.
Inclusive and Nurturing Schools
Funder: London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU)
Duration: January 2024 - March 2026
Lead: Polly Casey
About: The Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) commissioned the Inclusive and Nurturing Schools (INS) programme, which aims to reduce school exclusions and ensure pupils have healthy relationship behaviours and attitudes through systems change, supporting the whole school community to become more inclusive, nurturing and safe.
The aim of the INS programme is to reduce school suspensions and exclusions through systems change – by supporting schools to reflect on and critically assess their culture, practices, and policies. The VRU have commissioned a team at Anna Freud to evaluate the programme as a whole.
Further information can be found on the London Violence Reduction Unit website.
London Vanguard
Funder: NHS England
Duration: 3 years
Lead: Jenna Jacob
About: Underpinned by the framework for integrated care (community), the London Vanguards in North East London ICS, South East London ICS and North Central London ICS, are piloting a community-based holistic model of care. Vanguard involves prioritising the needs of children, young people and their parents and carers by actively engaging with local communities to build on existing services and infrastructures, plugging gaps in expertise and capacity as required. These teams work together to develop services to improve the wellbeing of children, young people, their parents and carers, and local communities who may be affected by violence.
Our project is a 3-year independent evaluation of London Vanguard.
Further information is avaiable on the NHS website.
IntegratED - Cohesion
Funder: Porticus
Duration: 18 months
Lead: Jenna Jacob
About: The project is an evaluation of a new programme being piloted. The programme aims to ensure that: 1) pupils who are at risk of exclusion and their families receive rapid and impactful support to be happy and successful in their mainstream school and 2) alternative provision settings and mainstream schools have a shared understanding of the evidence-based approaches that are most likely to support pupils at risk of exclusion. The Programme aims to support pupils in school years 7-8 (aged 11-13 years).
Beyond Programme
Funder: Alder Hey Children's Hospital
Duration: November 2023 - July 2024
Lead: Jenna Jacob
About: Beyond is a transformation programme in Cheshire and Merseyside. It aims to improve care for children and young people that supports their physical and mental health; it is a multi-agency programme with several layers of oversight, delivery and policy. It is underpinned by several policies (e.g., the NHS Long Term Plan, National Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Programme, Starting Well) and aims to reduce inequalities, to give children and young people the best possible start in life by focusing on priority areas. The overall aim of our evaluation is to identify what is working well and any elements for improvement in the design and delivery of the Beyond Programme.
On the Way to School
Funder: Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD) and the UK Medical Research Council
Duration: 2023 - 2026
Lead: Julian Edbrooke-Child (Co-Lead and Co-Investigator)
About: Active mobility interventions for the promotion of physical activity and mental well-being in adolescents in Bogotá, Colombia, and Maputo, Mozambique.
Further information can be found on the On the Way to School website.
United Against Bullying
Funder: Education Endowment Fund and Youth Endowment Fund
Duration: May 2023 – October 2025
Lead: Tanya Lereya
About: Bullying is defined as the repetitive, intentional hurting of one person or group by another person or group, where the relationship involves an imbalance of power. Involvement in peer bullying has been found to be associated with a range of adverse outcomes in childhood, including academic problems, school absenteeism, physical and mental health problems, and suicidal ideations and attempts.
United Against Bullying Plus (UAB+) is a whole school anti-bullying programme for schools in England run by the Anti-Bullying Alliance (ABA), which forms part of the National Children’s Bureau (NCB), and in partnership with Kidscape. It has universal and targeted elements, and the overall aim of the programme is to reduce bullying.
The Evidence Based Practice Unit is supporting on the programme's evaluation. The overarching aim of the evaluation is to explore feasibility, acceptability, and readiness for trial of United Against Bullying Plus (UAB+).
Further information can be found on the Anti-Bullying Alliance website.
Brief Educational workshops in Secondary Schools Trial (BESST)
Funder: Department for Health and Social Care
Duration: 2021 – 2023
Lead: Jessica Deighton
About: BESST is a large, national study testing the effectiveness of a day-long workshop programme called ‘DISCOVER’, for 16–18-year-old students experiencing low mood, stress or anxiety. DISCOVER aims to improve engagement, offer effective treatment and maintain participants’ motivation and improvement to reduce relapse. The study is supported by King’s College London (KCL). It is taking place in multiple sites across England: London, the South West, the North West, and the Midlands. It will involve a total of 60 schools and colleges and 900 sixth form students.
The study builds on prior research with over 100 students, which proved there was sufficient interest from students to run this larger study. The next step is to investigate whether the workshop programme is effective in reducing participants’ stress and improving their wellbeing with larger groups of sixth form students in these areas before it can be offered more widely in the UK.
There are several geographic hubs for BESST. The Evidence Based Practice Unit leads activity in North West England.
Further information can be found on the KCL website.
Read the latest research paper.
Community F-CAMHS
Funder: NHS England and NHS Improvement
Duration: 2018 – 2021
Lead: Julian Edbrooke-Childs
About: The Evidence Based Practice Unit and the Child Outcomes Research Consortium
We were commissioned by NHS England and NHS Improvement to evaluate the implementation and impact of Community Forensic Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (F:CAMHS) across England.
Community F:CAMHS are 13 highly specialist Tier 4 services. Community F:CAMHS provides input to the network around children and young people who are experiencing mental health and/or learning difficulties, and who are in contact with the youth justice system or present with a high risk of harm to self or others.
Our evaluation study comprised a mixed-methods design, combining quantitative service activity and feedback data, questionnaires and interviews with young people or their parents and carers, and interviews with staff and referrers. We also carried out an economic evaluation.
Education for Wellbeing
Funder: Department for Education
Duration: 2018 – 2024
Lead: Jessica Deighton
About: Education for Wellbeing is England's largest research trial of school-based mental health interventions. Schools are randomly allocated to use one of the following approaches:
- A set of five lessons for Year 9 that use role play designed to improve pupils’ understanding of mental health and reduce suicide rates. Developed in Sweden and America, Youth Aware Mental Health (YAM) encourages pupils to share their own ideas about how to maintain good mental health and how to help each other to find ways to resolve everyday dilemmas.
- A teacher training programme developed in Canada called The Guide. Adapted for England for the study, it develops teachers’ understanding of mental health, trains them on how to teach their pupils about it and addresses stigma.
- A series of eight lessons designed to increase young people’s skills around personal safety and managing their mental health, as well as helping them to identify their support networks.
- Training pupils in relaxation techniques embedded into the school day, every day for five minutes.
- Training pupils in mindfulness embedded into the school day, every day for five minutes.
So far, the programme has reached over 35,000 pupils across 400 schools.
The Evidence Based Practice Unit is evaluating the approaches, examining their impact on pupils’ mental health and wellbeing.
More information:
HeadStart Learning Team
Funder: The National Lottery Community Fund
Duration: 2017 – 2023
Lead: Jessica Deighton
About: HeadStart is a six-year, £67.4 million National Lottery funded programme set up by The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK. It aims to explore and test new ways to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people aged 10 to 16 and prevent serious mental-health issues from developing.
Six local authority led HeadStart partnerships in Blackpool, Cornwall, Hull, Kent, Newham and Wolverhampton are working with local young people, schools, families, charities, community and public services to make young people’s mental health and wellbeing everybody’s business.
EBPU is working with The National Lottery Community Fund and the HeadStart partnerships to collect and evaluate evidence about what does and does not work locally to benefit young people, now and in the future. Partners working with the EBPU on this evaluation include the University of Manchester and the Child Outcomes Research Consortium, a project of Anna Freud. This collaboration is called the HeadStart Learning Team. Previous partners in the HeadStart Learning Team include LSE and Common Room.
The Link Programme
Funder: Department for Education
Duration: 2019 – 2022
Lead: Jaime Smith and Melissa Cortina
About: EBPU led the development of the CASCADE framework which helps schools and specialist mental health services audit their work together and develop better working relationships. This framework was used as part of the Link Programme.
The Link Programme was delivered by Anna Freud and supported by NHS England and strategic leaders from clinical commissioning groups, local authorities, education departments, and the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector. The aim of the programme was to bring together local leaders in education and mental health to share challenges and best practice.
The resulting discussions and workshops enabled local areas to identify and develop pathways to timely and appropriate support for children and young people.
The Evidence Based Practice Unit evaluated the rollout of the Link Programme.
The Mercers' Company Schools Evaluation
Funder: The Mercers' Company
Duration: 2016 – 2022
Lead: Jessica Deighton
About: This project, which is a collaboration between the Evidence Based Practice Unit, the Child Outcomes Research Consortium, and the University of Manchester, aims to support The Mercers' Company's schools and colleges to monitor and evaluate their provision for their pupil’s mental health and wellbeing.
The original project engaged 13 schools and colleges across England from 2016 to 2019. The key elements of the 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 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.
The continuation of funding between 2019 and 2022 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.
The Mercers’ Company has been involved in education for more than 500 years, since the foundation of St. Paul’s School in 1509. They aim to be a force for educational innovation and excellence for the benefit and future success of students from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds.
The Framework of Integrated Care (SECURE STAIRS)
Funder: NHS England and NHS Improvement
Duration: 2018 – 2021
Lead: Julian Edbrooke-Childs
About: The Evidence Based Practice Unit (EBPU) and the Child Outcomes Research Consortium evaluated the implementation and impact of the Framework of Integrated Care (SECURE STAIRS).
The Framework for Integrated Care (SECURE STAIRS) is being implemented across the children and young people’s secure estate (CYPSE) in under-18 young offender institutions, secure training centres and secure children’s homes. It aims to improve the quality of care and outcomes for children and young people in the CYPSE. Eighteen sites in England are included in the national evaluation. The Framework for Integrated Care (SECURE STAIRS) provides a framework for a new way of working in the CYPSE that involves training staff to provide more developmentally-attuned, psychologically-informed care, which is centred around comprehensive, co-produced assessments of young people’s needs to ensure that all needs are identified.
EBPU researchers conducted a mixed-methods evaluation to explore the implementation and impact of the Framework for Integrated Care (SECURE STAIRS) and whether it results in sustained cultural changes. As part of the evaluation, sites collected routine service activity data and staff, children and young people and their parents and carers completed questionnaires. A smaller number of interviews and focus groups were conducted with staff and young people, and observations of staff meetings were carried out. An economic evaluation also took place.
Data collection took place between August 2018 and December 2020. Findings have been submitted to NHSE&I to inform policy and practice. Access the evaluation report.
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