Schools are constantly bombarded with new initiatives and strategies, often with glossy promotional materials and a hard sell.
These often cover topics such as mental health, in which teachers feel unskilled yet they are increasingly expected to take an active role.
Most schools will have many examples of such initiatives where the initial promise fails to deliver.
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There is an opportunity cost - as well as staff, parent and pupil frustration and distress - related to such failures.
There is also the chance of doing harm rather than just being ineffective.
Initial teacher training is brief and cannot possibly cover all the additional difficulties for which pupils may require support, so how can we equip current and future educators to sift out the reliable information?
Mental health support
Many people are working hard to develop an evidence base for education and interventions related to children’s ability to access education, such as the Education Endowment Foundation, which provides evidence digests, advice and summaries about a huge range of issues that teachers may encounter.
Similarly, the Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health’s mission is to promote evidence-based mental health practice for all professionals working with children and young people, including teachers and other school staff.
An informal survey of mental health and education practitioners revealed several clear favourites in terms of reliable sources of practical information about mental health conditions, which are listed below.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of high-quality mental health information, but all these organisations are committed to evidence-based practice.
The importance of evidence
So why should such a commitment be so important? Personal experience is the least reliable source of information, even among experts. Despite experts’ wider range of experience, a plethora of cognitive biases conspire to undermine its reliability.
Furthermore, most mental health and behavioural problems fluctuate. They get noticed at their peak, so, regardless of intervention, they are likely to reduce over time.
This is not an excuse for inaction in relation to poor mental health, such as children demonstrating long-term difficulties.
The reduction will be small, and difficulties remain well above the population average, but this change can provide an illusion that interventions are effective when they are not.
Being clear about the outcomes wanted, and using validated tools to measure them before and after intervention, will focus your efforts and demonstrate progress, but the lack of a counterfactual means that any changes detected are likely to overestimate the impact of your intervention.
For these reasons, ensuring that all teachers qualify with strong critical-appraisal skills and are provided with opportunities to refresh and deepen their understanding of what constitutes evidence of effectiveness seems essential.
Here are my recommended sources of free and high-quality information about mental health in children and young people and schools:
Tamsin Ford is a board member of the Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health and seconded to the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Faculty Executive Committee at the Royal College of Psychiatrists
