OUR LEARNING COMMUNITY
E: Can you tell me a little about your background and what influenced your interest in researching the impact of school‐based wellbeing programmes?
J: I finished my PhD in 2021 at UCL – and that was primarily focused on the mental health consequences of risk-taking in teenagers – before moving to Sydney to start a postdoc at UNSW and the University of Sydney. This work investigated universal school interventions, those which are delivered to all students in a school or year group. These interventions are used by schools to try to improve mental health. I was fascinated by findings – including our own – indicating that sometimes these universal interventions made things worse; the young people involved in mental health interventions tended to report higher rates of mental health problems compared to those in the control group. So, I wrote a grant proposal to the Wellcome Trust in London to explore these effects further, and that ' s how I ended up leading this current programme of work at Oxford. If we can identify the mechanisms influencing negative effects in certain school interventions, like social contagion of mood and mental health, we can begin to consider how to improve wellbeing in schools.
E: And some of your work was undertaken when you were employed by the Department for Education?
J: Yes, I previously spent some time working as a social researcher looking at how we can deliver school interventions for wellbeing at scale across the country, and also looking at the role of school expulsions and school absences on mental health outcomes among young people. This was a really insightful experience which also highlighted how difficult it can be to make changes to education policy on a national scale.
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