Dear parent/carer/guardian,
Hello, and thank you for reading this email. My name’s Julian and I work at
Anna Freud. I’m working with your school on a research project to look at the impact of support for young people to be healthy and happy at school. I’m passionate about this project for many reasons. I’ve seen how children in my family seem to be increasingly experiencing a range of challenges that undermine their mental health and I want to know what this might mean for them and other children like them.
To look at this, we are working with lots of different schools. All of them are continuing with the existing wellbeing support they provide to young people. In half of the schools, staff will be trained to work with pupils differently by learning more about how things people have experience might impact on them. We don’t know if this different way of working with pupils is better, worse, or the same as existing wellbeing support. This is what we want to find out in the research. The findings from this research will be used to inform how schools support the wellbeing of their pupils in the future.
If you click on the following link (
https://kca.training/project/youth-endowment-fund) and go to “Materials to take part in the study for parents and guardians”, you can find attachments for the information sheet, which contains more details about who we are, what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it. There you can also find a document that tells you about how your child’s data would be used if they were to take part (the data we collect will not be connected to specific children, and we will not share an individual child’s data with their school or any other bodies).
If you do not want your child to take part in the study, they don’t have to. It’s a decision you may want to take together. We would like as many people as possible to take part in order to aid our understanding about what makes a difference for children and their schools. If you and your child choose not to take part, it will not affect their rights or support. Please think with your child about whether now is a good time for them to take part or not.
If you are happy for them to take part, you do not need to do anything.
Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about this study. You can find me at
julian.childs@annafreud.org.
Thank you again for your time,
Julian Edbrooke-Childs