Development of Methodological Guidance for the Coproduction of Health Interventions: Targeting wellbeing in secondary schools to prevent mental health issues

In Wales, policy (Together for Mental Health) highlights wellbeing as a prevention priority. A high prevalence of mental health issues begin before 15 shifting the prevention agenda to adolescence. Secondary schools are a key setting to intervene due to reach in the population, their duty to contribute to student wellbeing, and because young people through the Young Wales Project have prioritised wellbeing support in schools. School-based wellbeing interventions with no stakeholder involvement that use interventions with fixed components have shown limited effectiveness on mental health, demonstrating a need for alternative intervention development methodologies.

Co-production - a process where stakeholders are supported to follow a standardised process to generate health interventions tailored to local contexts - has been successful for other school-based intervention development. However, what makes co-production successful is unknown so guidance is needed. This project will fill guidance and wellbeing intervention gaps through: Synthesising co-production school-based health interventions literature to develop an initial co-production theory; Consulting teachers to refine initial theory and develop co-production training based on the theory. Training will be piloted with young people; Conducting case study research to further refine co-production theory and understand wellbeing in schools. The PhD student will train four teachers and four students from three secondary schools (n-24) in co-production and support them to follow a co-production process. They will produce intervention action plans through developing action groups that explore what factors effect wellbeing and how to intervene. The data set will be audio recordings and field notes of training and action group meetings, action plans, and post-intervention semi-structured interviews with trained stakeholders, and focus groups with action groups. This project contributes to wellbeing through comparing co-produced interventions with the evidence base to determine gaps, but the project will have wider applicability by utilising refined theory to produce co-production guidance.