CUES in schools

We recognise the primary school community as the ideal opportunity to offer non-stigmatising universal education about mental health issues, teach children how to look after themselves emotionally and develop a shared language that enables children, teachers and parents to talk about psychological well-being.

Every stage of our school programme design and development has been shaped by feedback from children and teachers, enabling us to create a programme delivered to whole classes that is accessible and acceptable for children and meets the statutory guidance and key priorities for mental health support in primary schools.

CUES has been delivered in person by clinicians to over 6,500 children with service evaluation* showing high ratings of acceptability by children and teachers and improvements on whole class mental health knowledge and well-being.  Importantly, children identified as more vulnerable (those scoring within a clinical range on self-report measures of wellbeing/distress and emotional and behavioural difficulties) consistently show significant improvement following the CUES programme.

ollowing this success, we have now digitalised the CUES programme to provide an evidence-based intervention at much greater scale.  Development of this digital programme has required an iterative process with children and teachers to ensure a high quality, robust and accessible resource.  It involves an interactive web platform that can be delivered to the whole class and led by a teacher. Each of the CUES learning objectives has been translated into a combination of real-life video, animation and interactive exercises. This is accompanied by a hard copy workbook and home access to an engaging website.  The effectiveness of this Digital Programme will be rigorously tested through a Randomised Control Trial due to commence September 2022.

To find out more please email: primarymentalhealth@slam.nhs.uk

Qualitative feedback suggests that the key clinical content of the programme has been successfully translated into the digital platform:

CUES has helped me with a lot of things but most of all helped me learn how to keep myself happy and healthy

- Year 4 child

CUES has helped me to worry less and it has things to distract me when I am worrying

- Year 4 child

CUES has taught me how to stop unhelpful thoughts and to make helpful thoughts’

- Year 4 child

It’s like I’ve learnt a secret language after many years of teaching…..this is really going to help the children

- Year 4 teacher