HeadStart national evaluation final report

Mhairi Holland, Lorraine Joyce, Colleen Souness, Nicholas Lough

In July 2022 we celebrated the culmination of the HeadStart programme, a six-year, £67.4 million commitment by The National Lottery Community Fund to explore and test new ways to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people aged 10–16.

Launched in 2016, HeadStart was delivered across six local authority partnerships; Blackpool, Cornwall, Hull, Kent, Newham and Wolverhampton, and over those six years we have seen positive developments in so many young people's mental health and the systems of support around them.

Today, Anna Freud has published the final evaluation report for HeadStart. This report represents an incredible milestone in our journey to understand and improve young people's mental health and wellbeing. This is the culmination of research conducted in HeadStart over the last five years, which resulted in over 60 publications.

Thanks to the HeadStart Learning Team and partnerships, HeadStart has contributed valuable evidence and insights about young people’s mental health in England that will continue to shape mental health initiatives and support in future.

The programme reached 24,500 children and young people through targeted support, 246,000 young people through universal provision, and 5,200 parents and carers. More than 24,000 staff have been trained in ways to support young people’s mental health and wellbeing.

Here’s a closer look at some of the findings:

HeadStart provided rich evidence around the factors that serve to undermine children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, as well as protect them. Studies in HeadStart found that certain factors increased a young person’s chance of experiencing a mental health problem, such as being from a low-income family and having special education needs. And the more risk factors in a young person’s life, the more difficult they can be to manage.

However, the findings also indicated that the more we can embed support and protective factors around a young person, the better their mental health. For example, having multiple trusted sources of support (e.g. from family, friends and school), the ability and confidence to regulate emotions, an awareness of strengths and struggles, and the ability to develop and use coping strategies when needed are all factors that can be bolstered to reduce the likelihood of young people experiencing difficulties.

While we can't protect young people from ever having mental health difficulties, learning about risk and protective factors provides insight into how we can better support young people to cope through adverse experiences.

Findings from the ‘Impact of Headstart Interventions on Secondary Pupil Absence, Exclusion and Attainment paper’ indicate that HeadStart prevented approximately 800 students from experiencing a school exclusion in 2016/17, its first year of implementation. This represented a 10% reduction in exclusion rates across HeadStart local areas, and an estimated saving of £6 million.

While the study showed these promising reductions in exclusion rates, it cannot tell us whether the decline in exclusion rates was due to improvement in school policies or changes in young people’s behaviours at school - or a combination. The six HeadStart partnerships designed multiple interventions to address both.

These findings matter because it suggests the potential of programmes like HeadStart to support young people to remain in school Exclusion from school has significant implications for young people’s future prospects so any interventions showing the potential to reduce exclusions is encouraging.

HeadStart research undertook multiple studies exploring the mental health and wellbeing of young people in early adolescence (11-14 years). Notable throughout the research was the worrying picture of mental health and wellbeing for girls in particular.

Findings showed that adolescent girls (11-12 years) report lower subjective wellbeing levels and have higher rates of mental health difficulties than adolescent boys. Such difficulties increased for girls as they progressed through adolescence and highlighted the beginning of secondary school as an important opportunity for early intervention among girls to prevent problems from escalating.

The research also explored other differences, such as the types of difficulties boys and girls experienced: a higher proportion of boys described experiencing explosive anger, lack of friends, struggles with learning and behaviour at school and perceived victimisation by teachers.

On the other hand, a higher proportion of girls described feelings of worry and fear and a lack of confidence. HeadStart also confirmed the picture emerging elsewhere of the higher mental health needs and lower wellbeing and social support among transgender and non-binary young people, and those who were questioning their gender identity.

These insights, alongside numerous other findings from the large-scale research in HeadStart, offer valuable evidence for ongoing shaping of mental health initiatives and support for – and with - young people.

Findings from the research indicate that involving young people in the development of projects and services can improve the lives of individual young people and help in establishing more youth-focused and youth-friendly programmes.

Young people described HeadStart as something separate and unique from other aspects of their lives and shared that a different kind of culture was created in collaborative spaces, giving them an equal seat at the table.

The HeadStart learning team published a series of studies which explore the models of participation that currently exist within the field, the participation activities that took place across the six HeadStart partnerships and a study on young people’s perspectives and experiences on participation activities.

As well as supporting improvements for individual young people, HeadStart also aimed to be a catalyst to reshape the existing systems of support around them.

The national evaluation explored the changes HeadStart partnerships aimed to make at local level. The findings indicate that HeadStart changed people’s awareness, attitudes and ways of working by bringing together stakeholders from different parts of the system.

Another legacy of HeadStart is the development of the Wellbeing Measurement Framework (WMF), a set of validated measures designed to help schools assess pupil mental health, including positive wellbeing, behavioural or emotional difficulties. The WMF tool is available for schools, and HeadStart’s WMF large-scale anonymised dataset has already been used to inform initiatives and research by others and will be publicly available for use in future via the UK Data Service to maximise its utility and further our understanding about young people’s mental health and wellbeing.

Do you want to find out more?

You can read the full evaluation or explore the many publications and resources produced by Anna Freud and their HeadStart Learning Team partners.

You can also find a wealth of learning produced by the National Children’s Bureau and The National Lottery Community Fund exploring HeadStart practice across the six partnerships in our own evidence library.