A project funded by Brighton & Hove City Council
The Brighton & Hove TaMHS Project was part of a government-funded initiative to identify and support children and young people aged 5 to 13 years who may be at risk of, and/or experiencing, mental health difficulties. The project focused on children and young people aged 9-12 years (in 8 primary and 4 secondary schools) who were experiencing interpersonal difficulties and exhibiting negative patterns of social interactions. This approach was based on the recognition that youths with problems in relating to, and interacting with, their peers are more likely to be at risk of mental health difficulties.
Over the course of the TaMHS project in Brighton & Hove, a significant advance was made in the approach to assessment. Building on initial work using sociometric assessments and a number of separate paper-based self-report measures of mental health assessments, new online assessment tools were developed, trialled, and validated, before rolling out across all TaMHS schools and eventually to an even wider range of schools across the city.
A wide variety of approaches to intervention was explored in the course of the TaMHS pathfinder in Brighton & Hove. Informed by the results of the assessments, the TaMHS Project Team worked with staff in each of the TaMHS schools to identify the needs of individual pupils, groups of pupils, or even the school community as a whole. This process resulted in research-informed interventions, which could range from one-to-one therapeutic interventions conducted by primary mental health workers, to small group work coordinated by learning mentors, to whole-school work (e.g., SEAL) that involved all staff within the school. Changes exhibited by pupils experiencing different kinds of interventions were investigated through use of follow-up assessments at the end of each year.
Although this was not a randomised control-group design, since the project was an exploratory pathfinder, the research evidence supported the value of the Brighton & Hove TaMHS Project both in supporting pupils’ social, emotional, and mental health needs and in supporting school staff to work effectively in this area. In both years of the project, statistically significant changes were observed in key aspects of pupils’ social and emotional functioning following their participation in various intervention strategies. The nature and extent of changes observed were different depending on the particular interventions utilised, although there were also some general improvements for both primary and secondary pupils when collapsing data across all interventions. The positive changes in pupils’ assessment scores observed during the project were accompanied by statistically significant improvements in staff’s perceptions of pupils’ relationships, interactions, and skills, as well as in their confidence about school support both for pupils’ needs and for their own needs.