Health and Wellbeing in Schools Project - Final Report

Executive summary

1. The main aim of this report is to focus on outcomes from the Health and Well-being in Schools project, which ran from September 2008 to March 2011, and the learning it created. It is hoped that this learning can be taken forward to inform future initiatives developed to support health and well-being in school-aged children and young people.

2. The key messages from the project make it clear that initiatives focusing on improving the health and well-being of school-aged children and young people within the Curriculum for Excellence cohort (aged 3-18 years) and their families, particularly at key transition stages, can be implemented within schools without injections of additional funding. These initiatives involve using existing resources differently, rather than introducing new resources.

3. Significant learning from the project includes the observation that following appropriate preparation, support workers were able to take on screening and surveillance work previously undertaken by registered practitioners and to act as health links between school and the home. This released registered professionals' time to focus on early intervention/prevention programmes targeting vulnerable groups of children and young people at key transition stages, rather than providing crisis interventions. The impact of family support workers was also striking, with teachers reporting better classroom attentiveness from children whose families were receiving support from these staff.

4. While there was no formal evaluation of the outcomes of the project, it nevertheless generated a wide range of evidence sources that were accessed to demonstrate the impact it had on the health and well-being of children and young people within the demonstration sites. These evidence sources included:

• reports prepared for the national steering group;
• reports prepared for local steering groups;
• intelligence gathered by project officers at local level and by the national programme manager nationally;
• reflective diaries maintained by the project officers; and
• the report and source materials emerging from the Open Space series of events.

5. The report draws together some key messages for stakeholders as they move forward before presenting specific impacts and outcomes at strategic and operational levels. It also contains some brief descriptions of initiatives within the demonstration sites to act as examples of activity in defined areas. While the examples have been situated within specific subsections of the report, it is clear that some of the projects described have relevance in more than one area - projects that address, for instance, early interventions but also transitions, or which focus on mental health but also physical activity.