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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BOOST (Building social and emotional skills to BOOST mental health resilience in children and young people in Europe)

Teaser

Summary

The BOOST project is a collaborative effort between researchers with expertise in public health, psychology, education and service design; experts in dissemination, as well as school owners and policy makers. Through the development of an innovative approach, the BOOST project aims to promote mental health and well-being in the young. Mental well-being is central to population health; therefore, it is important to promote prevention interventions that create resilience with long-lasting effects.
The BOOST project will create a holistic population-based approach to promote mental well-being in primary school children. The BOOST project will go beyond state of the art of current social and emotional learning programmes and develop an approach to integrate social and emotional components with documented effect into mainstream school environments, targeting school staff\'s pedagogical skills and their interaction with children. In addition, because organisational development is key to enabling successful implementation, a service delivery model is being developed to facilitate implementation and uptake of the approach in whole school environments among all school personnel, including leaders and school owners. This holistic combination of school staff empowerment and organisational development is what is known as the BOOST approach.

Work performed

The work carried out during the first 18 months of the BOOST project has provided a solid foundation on which to base the BOOST approach, as well as knowledge on the context of the three countries, Norway, Poland and Spain, where this approach will be implemented. So far, the BOOST project has completed the formative study in WP1, and is currently working on WP2, which is the development of the BOOST approach. The formative study, which included a literature review, as well as a policy review and qualitative interviews in the three countries, has given us an important foundation on which to base the approach.

The study highlights several factors which need to be taken into consideration when developing the approach: 1) There are legislative documents emphasizing the need for working with SEL in the three countries, but schools lack guidelines on how; 2) Schools perceived most SEL programmes to be too comprehensive for their needs, too resource intensive and too rigid; 3) Schools were mostly problem focused when working with SEL; 4) There was an expressed desire for WHOLE school approaches in working with SEL; 5) Schools are measured primarily on academic achievement and therefore prioritize this over SEL achievements 6) SEL programmes need to be flexible and adaptable to the resources and needs of each school; 7) Schools feel they lack competence in dealing with parents; 8) Strategies are needed to deal with childrenâ€™s use of modern technology (gaming/social media/internet).
Based on the findings from WP1, we are now working on the development of the BOOST approach, which includes an ongoing consultation process involving the projectâ€™s advisory board as well as teachers and other school staff in Norway, Poland and Spain. Currently, the BOOST approach comprises a service delivery model, learning modules and tools, all to be delivered in an online platform. A contextualised BOOST approach will be implemented in intervention schools in the three countries in the autumn of 2019.

The project has also finalized the protocols for the evaluation of the approach (WP4 Implementation study, WP5 Effectiveness study, and WP6 Economic evaluation). The process of obtaining ethical approval to carry out the research is complete in two of three countries and will be finalised in the last country in September 2019.
Close collaboration and dialogue with all stakeholders have been a priority for the BOOST project, not least because this collaboration will ensure the relevance of the BOOST approach to stakeholders and thus increase the chance of its uptake and ownership at the end of the project. The project\'s exploitation and dissemination strategies lay out how the project will achieve the goals of uptake and dissemination throughout the project period. In addition, country plans are being developed outlining a roadmap on how to target a wide range of stakeholders both locally and nationally. So far, contact and dialogue with diverse stakeholders (schools, teacher\'s union, teaching programmes, researchers, local governments, health professionals) have confirmed the importance, relevance and timeliness of this project in general and the BOOST approach more specifically.

Final results

While there is ample evidence documenting the effect of various SEL programmes, several challenges to their successful implementation, including scalability, sustainability and long-term effect on mental health and well-being have been identified. BOOST will target the pedagogical and support skills of school personnel in general as well as the organisational approach of the school and promote whole school competence in social and emotional learning. This will indirectly target large populations of schoolchildren and ensure more long-term effects. School environments are characterized by in-depth emotional exchanges and as such can have a great impact on children\'s well-being. School personnel will have an opportunity to gain knowledge and master practical skills providing them with sense of empowerment and efficiency.
There are currently whole school approach SEL programmes targeting teachers, however these programmes usually need trained experts and outsiders to provide training, and require either long-term or short-term, often rigid training. These constraints often prove to be resource intensive and lead only to short-lived changes. The BOOST project is currently developing a flexible and co-creative approach which is adaptable to the needs, resources and system of the individual school. We hope this will encourage ownership and thus sustainability. Sustainability will create a reinforcing, long lasting, social and emotional learning environment, which will constantly promote children\'s well-being, and enable long-term change. In this manner, we expect to see, in the short term, improved mental well-being in the school children where the implementation takes place.
In the short-term, the BOOST project will also collect data from the three contexts, Norway, Poland and Spain, where the BOOST approach is implemented and thus provide a strong evidence base on the effectiveness, economic evaluation and process of implementation of the BOOST approach in schools. This will enable one to compare not only the effect the BOOST approach has on mental well-being in the different populations, but also whether the approach ensures health and gender equity and provides social benefits to the different populations. This evidence base can eventually be used by other European settings which decide to use the approach or as basis for other interventions.
We expect that the approach will not only have an effect on social and emotional competence, and resilience, but also on school climate, thus creating a positive school environment which promotes learning. Previous research has shown that school climate can promote students\' academic achievement, affecting continued success in school and reducing early leavers from education. In the same manner, building young people\'s resilience can reduce the risk of poor mental health later in life.