Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/284212 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Series/Report no.: 
IFS Working Papers No. 22/42
Publisher: 
Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London
Abstract: 
In light of the dramatic rise in mental health disorders among adolescents seen in the past decade across the world, there is an urgent need for robust evidence on what works to combat this trend. This paper provides the first robust evaluation of the impacts on school outcomes of 6-year funding programme (HeadStart) for area-level mental health interventions for adolescents. Exploiting educational administrative data on ten cohorts of state-educated secondary school students, we use the synthetic control method to construct counterfactual outcomes for areas that received the funding. We show that the funding did not affect students' absenteeism or academic attainment, but it prevented around 800 students (c. 10% of students typically excluded yearly) from being excluded in its first year. The transient nature of this effect suggests that sustained funding for intervention is a necessary but not sufficient condition to maintain programme effectiveness over time.
Subjects: 
exclusion
absenteeism
mental health
intervention
adolescents
synthetic control methods
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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