Helping schools become welcoming places for young people

School should be a place where everyone feels safe, supported, and like they belong. This study is working with young people to create a program that helps schools understand why it can be hard for young people to be in school—and what could help to make it better.

What we want to achieve

To help with Emotionally Based School Non-Attendance (EBSNA), schools should focus on things they can change — like talking openly about mental health, using fair and caring behaviour rules, and building good relationships between teachers and students. 

Our aim

We will develop a program to help schools prevent EBSNA and support students who don’t attend often, by making school a place where students feel safe, supported, and connected.

Experts say that helping students feel welcome and included at school is the first step to making sure they come to school regularly.

How we'll do it

First, we will link anonymous data from young people mental health surveys, healthcare records and an education database, to help us understand which young people are most affected by EBSNA and why. 

We will then conduct a survey and interviews with young people experiencing EBSNA, their parents and school staff to find out why they miss school, and what would help them to go back. This information will help us to understand more about EBSNA.  

Then, we will ask a group of young people to look at information we collected about EBSNA.They will identify the most important issues our programme should address to stop EBSNA from happening and help students return to school.  

In the next stage, young people experiencing EBSNA, their parents and professionals (school staff, mental health professionals and researchers) will help us to decide which strategies to include in a school programme to tackle EBSNA. 

Once we’ve chosen these strategies, we will test the programme in 2-3 secondary schools with high level of attendance problems. We will check if the programme is useful and works well in schools. We will also see how many students, parents and staff are willing to take part. This will help us plan for further testing in more schools.  

Public involvement

This project has been co-produced with young people who have attendance problems, their parents and secondary school teachers. Most of them told us that emotional issues and school environment are the biggest reasons for non-attendance.  

Young people’s involvement is key to making sure the programme we develop is useful, acceptable and effective. We’ll work with 5-6 young people from different backgrounds as co-researchers. They will help run the study and make important decisions. We’ll also set up a panel of parents, teachers, and experts to provide advice about the project. 

Sharing findings

The public involvement panels will help us decide the best ways to share the findings of the project.

    • We’ll share our findings on a project website, in newsletters, on social media posts, in blogs and through webinars.
    • We’ll present the programme to schools and mental health networks and work with charities and support groups focused on school attendance.
    • We will also publish the study findings in academic journals and present them at professional and academic conferences.