ELiSS

A trial to to test the effectiveness of a special school mental health intervention for children with learning disabilities.

Background

Children with learning disabilities are more likely than other children to have mental health problems. Many children with learning disabilities go to special schools. There are currently no mental health programmes with good research evidence for children with learning disabilities in special schools. This means that children with learning disabilities are often left out of plans to promote good mental health at school.

Our aim

We will test whether a mental health programme for children with learning disabilities in special schools helps to improve their mental health. The programme focuses on learning about emotions. The programme is called Zippy’s Friends for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (ZF-SEND). We will also test if Zippy’s Friends-SEND (ZF-SEND) leads to improvements in mental health that make it worthwhile to spend time and money using the programme. This is usually called ‘cost-effectiveness’.

What we will do

To test ZF-SEND, we will carry out a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT). We will find 66 special schools from across the UK. We will assign schools by chance (like flipping a coin) to deliver ZF-SEND for a whole school year or to carry on with what they currently do to support mental health. Each school will be asked to select about 10 children with learning disabilities aged 8-12 years to take part in the study. We will collect information about the children’s mental health from teachers, the children themselves, and their parents before the programme starts and at the end of the school year. We will also collect information about other things that might change – like children’s understanding of emotions. At the end, we will look to see if mental health is better in the children who are taught with ZF-SEND. We will also talk to children, teachers and parents to ask about how ZF-SEND worked for them (or not). We will find out how much time and other resources are needed to deliver ZF-SEND in special schools. We can then work out how much it costs to deliver.

Diversity and working with others

We will work with children with learning disabilities, parents and teachers throughout the research. They will help us with the study and help us to understand what the findings mean at the end. Children with learning disabilities are often left out of research and that is one of the reasons this study focuses on them. We will also make sure that children with different experiences are included. This will especially include children who are also autistic (in addition to having learning disabilities), children from different cultural backgrounds, and children from poorer and better-off families.

Sharing the findings

The most important people who will need to know about the findings of this research are children with learning disabilities and their families, schools/teachers, and people who decide what schools should do to help with children’s mental health. We will work closely with children with learning disabilities, parents and teachers to share what we find in ways that everyone will find useful. Children, parents and teachers will decide what needs to be said and how to do this. We expect to write some easier to read documents and to work with children and teachers to produce short information films.