ARC Outreach Alliance: Young People's Open Minds in Northwest London

How is the schools-based research conducted? 

We visit participating schools to deliver an online survey, which takes 20-25 minutes to complete. We can offer introductory sessions about the study, and provide cohort survey completion support if needed. The survey asks pupils about their mental wellbeing and experiences that may impact it; like bullying, friendship, and access to digital mental health support resources. All participants will be signposted to a high quality NHS digital resource designed specifically with young people in mind. 

A week after survey completion, we will invite the participants to fill in a 5-minute feedback questionnaire to let us know if they found the resource useful and highlight any barriers they experienced in accessing, understanding and completing it. We will not focus on the pupils' individual responses, our aim is to gather cohort level data and analyse any patterns or trends. 

Quintile Data for NW London CAMHS usage

As part of our analysis of the whole Northwest London area, we have used anonymised data showing how many young people in different post codes are accessing mental health services. 

We then matched the post codes to the schools and ranked schools, in order of which areas were using the most or least mental health services. We then split this list into five sections: quintiles 1-5. 

Quintile 1 schools had the lowest mental health usage in their area, while quintile 5 schools had  the highest. We then analysed the data to see the proportion of high and low use schools in each borough.