Co-producing school-based mental health interventions with young people, teachers, and schools: a case study

Schools are a prime setting for the delivery of universal and targeted mental health interventions. Current school-based mental health interventions may not be developed to fully meet student mental health needs and co-production is needed to understand what young people really want. Despite this, research on school-based mental health interventions does not consistently engage in co-production, involving stakeholders, such as young people and schools, in the decision-making, development, evaluation and/or implementation stages. This highlights that transforming the development of school-based mental health interventions is crucial to meeting all stakeholders' needs. In this paper, we aim to briefly review an approach to co-production that can be used when conducting research on school-based mental health interventions that centre stakeholder voices to drive meaningful change. We describe a case study to showcase this approach.

We highlight recommendations and important elements to consider for each stakeholder when engaging in different levels of co-production, including young people, teachers, and schools. We provide practical examples of how this may look like in practice, theoretical underpinnings, and impact on outcomes. Our case study of co-producing a talk to improve mental health literacy in secondary school students is highlighted to demonstrate how a group of young people, teachers, epidemiologist, psychiatrist, and researchers can work together to develop school-based mental health interventions.

Co-production can be successfully conducted amongst researchers and stakeholders to develop school-based mental health interventions. Changes made to the talk were guided by synthesis of feedback that aligned with the balanced needs, perspectives, and opinions of all stakeholders. The use of this co-production approach in research on school-based mental health interventions with young people, teachers, and schools has important implications for research, service provision, and stakeholder empowerment.