Rights respecting ethical practice with school HWB surveys

The SHINE Team would like to highlight the importance of the link between upholding the UNCRC legislation and meeting the research ethical approval requirements when using a health and wellbeing survey with young people in the school setting. The four UNCRC articles above are particularly important to us:

Article 5: Supporting parents/carers to guide their children so that as they grow up they understand how to use their rights in the best way. With the SHINE Mental Health survey, we ask schools to issue the parents/carer and pupils information sheets at least 2 weeks before the young people complete the survey. This is so that parents/carers have the opportunity to ask questions and speak to their children about what they are being invited to do. This is an essential requirement of the ethical approval granted to SHINE members to use the survey.

Articles 12 and 13: The SHINE mental health survey has been specifically designed to amplify Pupil Voice and involve the wider school community in improvement planning for health and wellbeing. The data reports produced for participating schools and Local Authorities are designed to be shared with the participating young people, their parents/carers as well as teaching staff and community partners. Supporting the understanding of the young people’s HWB context and enabling them to have a voice in the decision-making process for HWB improvement planning is central to the ethos of the SHINE MHWB survey, so that children can be represented and listened to in this priority area.

Article 16: The SHINE research team operates to the highest standards of data protection to keep the data of participating young people safe. No names are asked for when completing the survey. Schools are given a unique ID code so that the school name is not in the dataset. Dates of birth and postcodes, if provided, are converted to age and SIMD before being stripped off the stored dataset so that no individual could be recognised. The data reports only report the results for year group and gender as long as the minimum number requirements are met. The purpose of the data reports is for the wider school community to understand the health and wellbeing environment that the young people experience at school, so that priorities for improvement and strengths can be identified with a view to supporting the best interests of the young people