The University of Oxford has received a £1.5 million gift from Bukhman Philanthropies to support new research aiming to tackle one of the most pressing challenges of our time – young people’s mental health.
The OxWell School Compass project will strengthen Oxford’s work to improve youngpeople’s mental health and wellbeing by helping schools turn high-quality data into effective action. The project will build on the work of the OxWell Student Survey, a large school-based survey developed to understand the wellbeing of children and young people aged 9–18. Set up by Professor Mina Fazel in Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, OxWell explores and collects data to understand students’ experiences in and out of school, including wellbeing, belonging, bullying, sleep, online experiences, and access to mental health support.
By collecting data in a way that prioritises trust and anonymity, OxWell enables young people to share their experiences honestly. Results are returned directly to participating schools and local authorities, supporting them to understand patterns of need among their students, and informing health and education strategies at local, regional and national level.
To date, more than 130,000 student responses have been collected over five different waves. The next phase of OxWell focuses on making even better use of these data – supporting schools to not only understand their students’ needs but to translate insights into sustained improvements across school experience, mental health and wellbeing.
This new gift from Bukhman Philanthropies will enable the creation of the OxWell School Compass – a platform designed to guide schools through a set of priority areas based on the student profiles identified through the OxWell Survey. The aim is to harness digital innovation and smart-data tools alongside school-specific insights to provide each educational setting with a personalised selection of evidence-informed strategies and interventions to support students’ mental health, ranging from classroom initiatives to school and community-wide programmes.
Over the last decade, the OxWell team have developed invaluable partnerships with schools and decision-makers across the country who are eager to join on this new endeavour. An initital group of ten schools will be supported by Professor Fazel’s team to implement and evaluate their chosen strategies. By tracking students’ responses over time across individual schools, the project aims to build a clearer picture of student wellbeing and needs generating learning that can benefit not only the schools taking part, but also the wider education sector in the UK and internationally. The gift will also strengthen long-term capacity within the OxWell project, supporting continuity, scientific rigour and the development of the next generation of leaders in young people’s mental health research at Oxford.
Professor Mina Fazel, Chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and founder of the OxWell Student Survey, said: ‘This transformative gift gives us an opportunity to work with schools in a more helpful way, moving from insight to action. By combining high quality student data with practical, school- specific guidance, we believe the OxWell School Compass will help schools better respond to the needs of their students. We are incredibly grateful to Bukhman Philanthropies for their support and for sharing our excitement about this project’s potential to improve adolescent mental health during the crucial and formative school years.’
Daria Bukhman, Co-Founder and Chair of Bukhman Philanthropies, said: “Lasting progress in young people’s mental health requires both excellent data and the ability to act on it. OxWell’s work exemplifies how trusted research, digital innovation and collaboration with schools can come together to drive systemic change. We are delighted to support this next phase of OxWell and its ambition to strengthen mental health and wellbeing across schools in the UK and beyond.”