Can routinely collected school readiness data be used to predict children?s mental health problems?

This project aims to tackle the pressing issue of mental health problems in young people within the UK. Many young people experience a significant delay—often up to a decade—before receiving any mental health treatment. This delay can affect their well-being, education, family life, and overall health. If there were ways to detect young people at risk of mental-health problems earlier in life, this could give extra time and opportunity to support these young people.

Schools may be an ideal setting to detect mental health problems, given that most mental health problems begin before adulthood and nearly all children attend school. Schools also collect a lot of data on their pupils, that could pick up on early risk of mental health problems. However, we currently know very little about how data collected by schools could be used to detect risk for mental-health problems in young people. The proposed research will use routine school data, specifically, school readiness assessments at age 5, and test whether these predict future mental-health problems.