During this #childrensmentalhealthweek, which shines a spotlight on the importance of children and young people’s mental health, we are proud to announce that following a rigorous assessment process our curriculum, .b, has been awarded high ratings in the well-respected EIF Guidebook.
The Early Intervention Foundation champions and supports the use of effective early intervention to improve the lives of children and young people at risk of experiencing poor outcomes. The EIF Guidebook provides information about early intervention programmes that have been evaluated and shown to improve outcomes for children and young people, and is a key resource for commissioners and practitioners seeking effective early interventions.
The Guidebook rates the strength of evidence for a programme’s impact and its relative costs, and also provides a information about the specific outcomes a programme has been shown to improve, how the programme works, how it is delivered, and the conditions or resources that can make a programme more likely to be effective.
Mindfulness in Schools Project curriculum, .b, has received a high evidence rating of 3+ and its lowest cost rating of 1. We were able to submit a significant body of evidence from research projects to ‘demonstrate evidence of a significant positive child outcome through an efficacy study’ and ‘additional consistent positive evidence from other evaluations’ to successfully achieve the 3+ rating. This rating indicates the strength of the evidence that .b benefits child outcomes that are important to improving lives and reducing the demand for acute services or ‘late intervention’ later in life.
The EIF Guidebook also assessed .b on relative cost, and we achieved their lowest rating of 1. This indicates that our programme has a low cost to set up and deliver compared with other interventions reviewed by EIF.
We are very proud of the work that we do and are grateful that we are able to meet the high standard of evidence required by the Early Intervention Foundation. Schools implementing .b can be confident that there is strong evidence that this programme improves outcomes for young people.