Funded by the Department for Education, Education for Wellbeing was one of England's largest research programmes testing the effectiveness of school-based mental health interventions. The aim of the programme was to evaluate pioneering ways of supporting the mental wellbeing of pupils. It was conducted in three waves between 2018 and 2024.
The programme was split into two trials: AWARE (Approaches for Wellbeing and Mental Health Literacy: Research in Education), tested in secondary school settings, and INSPIRE (INterventions in Schools for Promoting Wellbeing: Research in Education), tested in both primary and secondary school settings.
This briefing focuses on the results for the AWARE trial which tested two established school-based curriculum interventions that have been developed and trialled elsewhere in the world: Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) and The Mental Health and High School Curriculum Guide (The Guide).
Specifically the trial explored the impact of these interventions in the short and longer term on young people’s self-reported emotional difficulties and intentions to seek help in future if experiencing mental health problems (in-tended help-seeking). The trial was conducted with 12,166 pupils across 153 schools.
