World Mental Health Day
Every year, the World Health Organisation marks World Mental Health Day on 10th October. This year, the theme, as set by the World Federation for Mental Health, is “Make mental health and wellbeing for all a global priority”.
According to the latest NHS figures, almost 700,000 children and young people were accessing mental health services at the end of June with thousands more new referrals happening every month. More young people than ever before are seeking support - and most aren’t getting the help they need.
One charity that has been working to make a difference to these figures is LifeLine Projects, with their SW!TCH Minds programme.
Over the last three years, LifeLine has been delivering a combination of weekly 1-2-1 mentoring by skilled and experienced youth workers in local schools, alongside weekly positive activities and holiday programmes, to secondary school students in the London boroughs of Havering, Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham.
In 2019, Rachel Dunford Consulting Ltd was proud to be appointed to provide an independent external evaluation of the programme, to determine the impact of LifeLine’s support on the young people who took part.
To coincide with World Mental Health Day 2022, our final evaluation report, which looks back over the last three years of SW!TCH Minds delivery, is being launched today. You can read the full report here.
We used a range of qualitative research tools to gather the perspectives of young people, their teachers, the team of Youth Development Workers (mentors) and where possible, representatives from each of the three commissioning Boroughs. Combining this evidence with quantitative data collected by LifeLine Projects using the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS), we drew the following conclusions:
We found that SW!TCH Minds has delivered significant positive impact to the students in all of the schools it operated in over the last three years.
The benefits that young people have experienced have been very visible to us as independent observers, but also to their teachers and mentors.
Given that schools can often be overwhelmed by, and wary of, interventions from outside for a variety of reasons, the fact that almost every single school has said that they would recommend the programme to others suggests that SW!TCH Minds has made a lasting positive impact.
It is our hope that the programme can continue to deliver its vital support to many more young people in the future.