Using data from emotional assessments to inform your school's mental health and wellbeing strategy
Marcus Adams
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As whole school approaches, strategies and policies become common ground in the world of children and young people's mental health, it is becoming increasingly important for school teams and senior leadership teams to understand the importance of and the insight provided by emotional assessments - both at an individual and collective level.
Whilst mental health and wellbeing are trending topics, priorities and perhaps even 'buzzwords' across the education and children's services workforce, there is still a widespread tendency for schools to still adopt academic and behaviour-centred policies and cultures - which therefore ignore or even remove the importance of wellbeing.
The importance of mental health and wellbeing is now widely known but this doesn't necessarily mean it is widely adopted in practice.
The wellbeing of students is increasingly being recognised as a factor in learning outcomes and as part of this, data collection has become a hot topic.
But what does it mean for schools with limited resources and no dedicated team to process the information?
How should this be used to inform a whole school strategy?
Collecting data on mental health and wellbeing is an important part of understanding and improving wellbeing.
It can be done in a variety of ways, from short surveys all the way through to detailed interviews with the whole community - this includes children (or students), families (often parents or carers) and professional teams (often teachers, social workers and other support workers) who work on the frontline.
Data collected can then be analysed to identify strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement.
Your school should prioritise data collection as part of your strategy if:
Remember, data is meaningless without context.
If you want to make the most out of the stats you collect, you need to understand how it fits into your existing culture and community.
When you collect data from your emotional assessments, it's important to understand how that data fits into the context of your community.
You can't make sense of numbers unless they're put into a broader context and interpreted in relation to other information.
If you want to make the most out of the stats you collect, then it's crucial that you consider how they relate to what happens on an individual level - but also how they relate to group, cohort and community levels as well.
Examples of this in practice include:
The culture of a school plays a huge role in the wellbeing of your whole community, so it’s vital that you take this into account when interpreting your data.
Collecting feedback from students, families and your school team at multiple and regular intervals can give you a good understanding and will allow you to see how this shifts and evolves over time.
It's important to understand the culture of your school, as it can play a huge role in student wellbeing.
When interpreting data from emotional assessments, it is important to take into account the culture of your school so that you don't misinterpret results or make assumptions about what they mean.
One example of this is:
If your assessments show that students report feeling anxious frequently but their teachers do not agree with this assessment based on their observations during class time (i.e. students are participating actively), then this could indicate a disconnect between how teachers perceive student behaviour versus how they actually behave when they're away from adults' eyesight (and therefore increased privacy).
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Evaluation is about looking for patterns and trends which can help identify and understand an issue (at the earliest possible opportunity) and identify the appropriate action to take.
When people are happier, they achieve more - it’s a definite correlation which we see when students feel more confident in themselves and what they’re capable of achieving.
The top emotional assessments used in schools to assess the mental health and wellbeing of students, families and school teams are:
Remember, the most important step is to take action! All the information in the world won't make a difference if you don't put it into practice.
"Working towards a world where everyone has access to the protection, support and resources to thrive in life"
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