A large charity, Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families’ mental health are conducting the largest Mindfulness project in English schools, commissioned by the Department for Education.
This is called the ‘Education for Wellbeing’ programme, which will work with over 370 schools to evaluate pioneering ways of supporting the mental wellbeing of pupils.
There are two research projects in our programme:
- AWARE project for Year 9, implementing and evaluating:
- Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) – a mental health promotion programme delivered by external professionals over five consecutive weeks.
- The Mental Health and High Schools Curriculum Guide (The Guide) – a mental health literacy curriculum delivered by teachers through six lessons lasting 45 – 60 mins each.
- INSPIRE project for Years 7 and 8, implementing and evaluating:
- Mindfulness – delivered for 5 minutes on a daily basis by trained school staff.
- Strategies for Safety and Wellbeing – eight consecutive weekly lessons each lasting 45 minutes delivered by trained school staff.
- Relaxation – delivered for 5 minutes on a daily basis by trained school staff.
Participating schools will be randomly allocated to deliver one of the above interventions or to continue with their usual practice. The first wave of the project is already underway and schools start delivery in January 2019.
They are now recruiting mainstream secondary schools to take part in the second wave of our research, delivering the interventions next academic year (2019-2020). Schools allocated to an intervention delivered by school staff will receive free training from the Centre. All participating schools will be remunerated £1000, so if you’re interested, please get in touch with them!
I think that this study will be fantastic because the mindfulness sessions are 5 minutes long a day – just the same as the practices in my mindfulness programme. I believe that any longer then children (or adults!) will struggle to focus and it is important to make this a daily practise so that they learn the skill and t becomes a habit. This is unlike the Paws.b program that some schools follow which is a short series of hour-long mindfulness sessions.
I am sure that this study will find positive results like I have in my studies and that the teachers and children in the participating schools will love mindfulness!
The Mindfulness Teacher 