School-based early interventions
Contemporary childhood
Schools play a key role in supporting children’s mental health. Catching problems early can prevent long-term issues, and school is the perfect place to help young people learn how to look after their wellbeing.
At the King’s Maudsley Partnership, we work closely with schools through services like the Maudsley Education Consultation Service (MECS). MECS runs the School Resilience Project, helping schools understand student needs through wellbeing data and tailored support. In December 2024, we launched the School Mental Health Innovation Network (SMHIN) with MECS and the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. This brings together schools, researchers and mental health professionals to co-create practical, evidence-based tools that meet the real needs of school communities.
Find out more
Read more about MECS and their work here.
Our work with schools also extends to programmes CUES-Ed and DISCOVER, which have been designed by experts at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.
Clinical work
CUES-Ed is a successful and innovative early intervention programme rooted in evidence based Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). Working with classes of primary-aged children from 7 to 10 years, CUES-Ed teaches children effective skills and techniques to look after themselves and enhance resilience. CUES-Ed was designed after young people said they would have benefitted from the skills to cope with mental health problems from an earlier age.
DISCOVER is an innovative, evidence-based mental health programme, based on CBT principles for older teenagers at school. Through individual and group sessions, DISCOVER enables young people to learn techniques to address their problems. The team has also created a DISCOVER app for participants to remain motivated to make changes.
Partnership work
The CUES-Ed team is committed to working in partnership with researchers and finding effective and sustainable early intervention to improve children’s mental health.
The DISCOVER programme evolved, with the help of teenage advisers, from an existing model for adults created by Dr June Brown, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience, King’s College London. Dr Brown is now leading a DISCOVER trial in 60 schools across England.
Future vision for children and young people
CUES-Ed’s ambition is to build a sustainable model which will offer every Year 4 child in the UK access to the programme. To do this we need to digitalise the programme to provide an accessible, evidence-based intervention on a larger scale, which we know is achievable. This will ensure CUES-Ed has potential for universal reach.
DISCOVER is aiming to expand its reach beyond London and the southeast. Additional funding would enable the rollout of a framework to support new DISCOVER teams, create a bespoke DISCOVER training package for teachers to sustain their students’ progress and create a new version of DISCOVER for care leavers.
Read more about research and key publications from the CUES-Ed and DISCOVER teams
Sclare, Irene, Daniel Michelson, Liz Malpass, Fay Coster, and June SL Brown. 2014. ‘Innovations in practice: DISCOVER CBT workshops for 16-18 year olds: development of an open-access intervention for anxiety and depression in inner-city youth’, Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 20: 102-06.
Brown, J.S.L., Emily Blackshaw, Daniel Stahl, Lisa Fennelly, Lynn McKeague, Irene Sclare, and Daniel Michelson. 2019s. ‘School-based early intervention for anxiety and depression in older adolescents: A feasibility randomised controlled trial of a self-referral stress management workshop programme (“DISCOVER”)’, Journal of Adolescence, 71, 150-161
Redfern, Jolley, Bracegirdle, Browning, & Plant (2019). CUES-Ed: An in-service evaluation of a new universal cognitive behavioural early mental health intervention programme for primary school children. Child & Adolescent Mental Health.
