Written Evidence Submitted by
Laura Earnshaw at My Happy Mind Limited (CYM082)
Written Evidence Submission
Children and Young People’s Mental Health Inquiry
Joint Committee on Education and Health & Social Care
Submitted by: myHappymind | Laura Earnshaw, Founder & CEO | laura.earnshaw@myhappymind.org
myHappymind is an award-winning, NHS-backed mental health and wellbeing programme for children aged 3–18, operating across more than 20 Integrated Care Board and local authority areas in England and over 2,000 schools and early years settings. Grounded in neuroscience and positive psychology, it delivers a structured whole-school curriculum for children, CPD-certified wellbeing resources for staff, and a digital app for parents. It is commissioned by ICBs, local authorities, and multi-academy trusts as a universal prevention layer within local mental health systems.
myHappymind has received national recognition, including the King’s Award for Enterprise (2025), the BETT Award for Transformational Impact (2026), and the BESA Transformational Impact Award, with Laura Earnshaw, the programme’s founder, being awarded a Fellowship on the NHS’ Innovation Accelerator. The NHS Confederation’s February 2026 briefing on Children and Young People’s Mental Health explicitly cites myHappymind as an example of effective school-based provision that reduces referrals to CYP mental health services.
Demand for CYP mental health services has grown by 152% between June 2019 and June 2025, with 320,000 children still waiting for support at the end of March 2024 <do we have a reference for this?>. The NHS Confederation notes that the 10% longest waits for first contact with CYP mental health services were approximately 2.5 years. Young people with mental health conditions are seven times more likely to miss significant school time, and those aged 16–25 are nearly five times more likely to be economically inactive than their peers. These trends are even more pronounced amongst children with SEN or neurodiversity, who are considered to be at higher risk of developing mental health problems. Left unaddressed, today’s cohort of children with unmet need risks becoming tomorrow’s cohort of mentally unwell adults, placing sustained pressure on the NHS.
These figures make the case for universal, school-based prevention not as a supplementary provision but as an inclusive, structural component of the mental health system, designed to meet the learning needs of all CYP, including those with SEN or Neurodiversity. myHappymind’s evidence demonstrates that well-implemented prevention reduces demand on every tier above it, from SENCos, to MHSTs to CAMHS, generating significant cost avoidance across public services.
myHappymind has conducted Return on Investment evaluations in partnership with multiple ICBs and local authorities. The data consistently demonstrates a ‘prevention pyramid’ effect, with fewer children needing higher-level intervention at each successive tier of support (SENCO, MHSTs, CAMHS). By preventing referrals to this network of support, capacity is created so that specialists can provide timely and effective support for those individuals with the highest level of need.
These outcomes have been replicated across more than 40 areas nationally. The following data from Hampshire, Southampton and Portsmouth, drawn from a survey of 70 of 135 school headteachers, is representative of the pattern consistently observed across our commissioned areas:
• 1,504 prevented referrals to CAMHS
• 2,522 prevented MSHT referrals
• 5,531 prevented referrals to the school SENCO
• 8,769 children with improved attendance
• 1,411 prevented suspensions, and 2,024 resolved safeguarding incidents
• All of which equated to a cost avoidance of approximately £8million - a 46x return on investment
Across commissioned areas, 100% of schools consistently report the programme has been transformational in establishing a whole-school approach to mental health; 100% report it has contributed to children’s ability to self-regulate; and 100% report it has positively supported children with SEN or SEMH needs.
A pre-COVID pilot across 25 schools in a highly deprived area found, after one year: CAMHS referrals reduced by 43%, MHST referrals reduced by 60%, internal exclusions reduced by 44%, and SENCo referrals reduced by 44%.
External validation of myHappymind’s impact data has been carried out by the University of Chester, and independent studies have also been conducted to understand the programme’s impact. One such study, carried out by Portsmouth City Council, compared rates of absence and suspension in schools using myHappymind and those without the programme. The study found that schools using myHappymind saw significantly lower rates of increase in suspensions (20% as opposed to 118% in schools without the programme), while also seeing a decrease in the increasing rate of absence (33% opposed to 66% in schools without the programme.
Further external validation of myHappymind is currently being conducted by the Centre For Mental Health, I would encourage you to seek out the final report once published.
Schools using the programme report:
"Since implementing the myHappymind programme at our school, we have witnessed a significant and positive transformation in our students' overall wellbeing and emotional resilience. The impact has been profound, leading to a noticeable reduction in both minor and complex wellbeing issues among our pupils.
myHappymind provides our staff and students with an incredibly accessible, structured and engaging framework for understanding and regulating their emotions. The five modules have been seamlessly integrated into our school day, equipping our children with practical, science-backed tools like mindful breathing and gratitude practices that they use effectively both inside and outside the classroom.”
Families share that:
“My son is so much better at sharing his feelings outside of school, and this has decreased the amount he gets really angry and heightened. He now has more strategies for dealing with big emotions. He also recognises when others are feeling emotional and suggests taking big breaths. South Wonston Primary has been so informative about the programme, and it is a real school ethos. The school feels even more supportive and welcoming.”
And pupils themselves shared:
“myHappymind has really helped me feel more calm and confident. It’s taught me ways to manage my feelings and cope with stress, which makes school life a lot easier. I feel like I can handle tough situations better now and enjoy my time at school more."
myHappymind strongly supports the Government’s commitment to expanding Mental Health Support Teams and Education Mental Health Practitioners. However, our experience across hundreds of schools, supported by the NHS Confederation’s own evaluation of MHST trailblazers, highlights a significant structural weakness in the current model: MHSTs are expected to both develop whole-school cultures of wellbeing and deliver targeted clinical interventions, but in practice, whole-school culture work consumes the capacity that practitioners need for targeted support.
The MHST trailblazer evaluation found that teams focused more on supporting individual children with mental health difficulties than on embedding whole-school or college approaches. This is a predictable consequence of under-resourced teams facing growing caseloads: assembling, running and updating a universal curriculum is displaced by immediate clinical need. The result is that the whole-school approach, the very foundation that makes targeted intervention more effective, fails to embed.
myHappymind resolves this tension by delivering the complete whole-school mental health curriculum, staff training, transition support, parent engagement, and impact reporting. enabling EMHPs to focus exclusively on the clinical tasks only they are qualified to perform: one-to-one and group interventions, triage, complex case support, and liaison with specialist services. Pre-prepared, quality resources provided by myHappymind that seamlessly integrate within the school timetable, mean that there is no detrimental impact on the workload of school staff.
Schools are equipped to handle lower-level needs internally. Referrals, when they occur, are better quality. Integration happens faster with less burden on stretched clinical teams.
A further challenge with the current delivery method of MHSTs is its Recruit-to-Train approach, where EMHPs are trained to be the sole provider of the service across a number of schools. A problem arises when staff attrition leaves schools reliant on an individual no longer in post. However, through myHappymind, existing school staff are utilised, upskilled, and empowered to deliver the whole-school approach to mental health support.
The committee should therefore consider recommending that MHSTs commission the whole-school approach work to be delivered by external providers rather than EMHPs, so that MHSTs can fulfil their specialist clinical role without being drawn into whole-school approach delivery. This would create capacity for EMHP’s to deliver more specialist interventions and for the whole school approach to be delivered to a high standard and so, meet its potential to prevent.
The February 2026 Schools White Paper (‘Every Child Achieving and Thriving’) and the DfE SEND Reform Consultation (‘Putting Children and Young People First’) signal a structural shift away from reactive, high-cost specialist provision towards prevention-first, mainstream inclusion. Both documents require schools to demonstrate a consistent Universal SEMH offer, contribute to National Inclusion Standards, publish Inclusion Strategies, and evidence earlier identification of need. myHappymind directly addresses each of these expectations.
The proposed tiered SEND support framework (Universal → Targeted → Targeted Plus → Specialist) requires the Universal tier to be robust and consistent. Without a structured programme at this level, children with SEMH needs escalate unnecessarily to higher-cost tiers, driving EHCP growth and specialist placement pressures. myHappymind’s whole-school model, delivered weekly to every child from EYFS to Year 6, provides the consistent Universal layer that the SEND reforms require. It includes a dedicated SEND specialist toolkit, EBSA tools, trauma-informed resources, speech and language support, and materials adapted for children with autism, ADHD, and partial sight or hearing impairment, ensuring that these individuals are able to access the programme alongside their peers, further developing levels of empathy and an understanding of others' needs within the classroom.
Teachers in Kirklees who work with SEND and SEMH pupils report that the programme supports emotional understanding in an accessible way rather than stigmatising, builds shared vocabulary between pupils and staff, and reduces the need for referrals. One SEN school noted that pupils in crisis independently request the programme’s breathing techniques, which are now written into their Regulation Support Plans.
Area-wide commissioning of myHappymind directly supports the White Paper’s goal of eliminating postcode variation in SEMH provision. Every school within a commissioned area receives the same high-quality baseline, regardless of individual school budgets or leadership capacity. This matters profoundly: across our commissioned areas, schools consistently report that they could not fund myHappymind independently without ICB or LA commissioning. If this programme is not system-commissioned, the children most in need, in the most resource-constrained schools, will not benefit.
The committee may be aware of the DfE’s Education for Wellbeing research programme, which found mixed results for some universal interventions, including evidence that standalone mindfulness programmes were not effective for all children and, in some cases, produced adverse outcomes for pupils who had already experienced mental health difficulties.
myHappymind is distinct from the interventions evaluated in that trial in several important ways. First, it does not rely on standalone mindfulness: it teaches children neuroscience, how the brain works, emotional literacy, and why self-regulation strategies are effective, alongside character strengths, appreciation, resilience, and relational skills. Second, it is not an externally delivered single-component intervention; it is a whole-school culture programme embedded in daily school life by class teachers who know their pupils, enabling them to embed learning throughout the school week and bringing about cultural, whole-school change. Third, its impact data are drawn from real-world implementation at scale, measuring not just well-being outcomes but also attendance, exclusions, safeguarding incidents, and referral rates to services, demonstrating system-level impact rather than just self-reported pupil well-being.
The NHS Confederation’s 2026 briefing explicitly endorses myHappymind as a model that ‘plays an important part in rolling out MHSTs’ and cites its evidence of reduced referrals and improved outcomes. The committee should note that the question is not whether universal school-based provision works (the evidence from thousands of school sites clearly demonstrates that it does), but whether the right kind of provision is being selected and commissioned at scale.
A persistent structural gap in children’s mental health is the disconnection between school and home. Children who acquire self-regulation strategies at school but cannot embed them at home cannot achieve the same outcomes. myHappymind’s parent-facing app provides every parent in a commissioned school with access to the same content, vocabulary, and tools their children are learning. Both school staff and parents themselves have commented on the benefits of myHappymind, with parents witnessing their children independently using strategies taught through myHappymind when at home, whilst also being able to access Specialist Toolkits themselves to provide the knowledge and practical strategies to support their children through challenges such as grief, EBSA, and more. In Bradford, 100% of schools said myHappymind was helping parents better understand mental health and wellbeing.
Effective community provision that best utilises digital technology is vital to delivering a preventative approach to supporting the mental health and wellbeing of CYP. The extensive impact reporting, which has been externally validated, clearly demonstrates how myHappymind successfully harnesses a digital delivery model to achieve positive outcomes for CYP.
To address digital inequalities, the programme leverages existing digital equipment in schools, enabling students to access the platform via classroom technology, such as tablets, laptops, and interactive whiteboards. This approach ensures that all students can engage with the resources, even if they don't have personal devices, promoting inclusivity and equal opportunities for all. For families where smartphones may not be an option, myHappymind offers additional support through lending libraries. These libraries provide access to physical copies of the best-selling My Happy Mind book, allowing families to engage with the programme offline. Furthermore, all digital resources are accessible on desktops, making them available on shared school or community computers.
This model is directly relevant to Best Start Family Hubs, Young Futures Hubs, and Early Support Hubs. Each of these community-based initiatives requires meaningful family engagement as a core design feature. A dedicated myHappymind programme for Early Years Settings directly supports the aims of Best Start Family Hubs, while mapping directly to the DfE’s Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED) objectives, helping families and early years providers to support children in reaching a Good Level of Development, inline with the government target of ensuring 75% of 5 year olds reach a good level of development by 2028.
myHappymind’s experience, having worked with over 2,000 schools and early years settings, provides a template for how school and setting-based provision can be aligned with community infrastructure to eliminate regional variation and ensure that every family, regardless of where they live, has access to the same high-quality early intervention.
myHappymind respectfully asks the committees to consider the following:
• Universal, preventative mental health education should be formally recognised and resourced as a structural component of the CYP mental health system. The ROI evidence from Hampshire and IOW (46x) demonstrates that it is among the most cost-effective public health investments available.
• MHST commissioning frameworks should allow MHSTs to commission whole-school prevention layers separately, so that EMHPs can focus on targeted clinical work. Without this, MHSTs cannot fulfil their specialist role, and whole-school cultures of wellbeing will not embed at scale.
• ICBs and local authorities should be funded and expected to commission whole-area approaches to school-based SEMH, consistent with the direction of travel in the Schools White Paper and SEND Reform Consultation. Individual school purchasing creates postcode variation, excludes the most deprived schools, and fails to achieve system-level outcomes.
• The new tiered SEND support framework must invest in a robust Universal SEMH layer to prevent unnecessary escalation to Targeted, Targeted Plus and Specialist tiers. Without this, EHCP growth and specialist placement costs will continue to rise despite reform.
• Ofsted’s inspection framework should explicitly and consistently recognise whole-school preventative mental health provision as a component of personal development and inclusion, providing schools with a clear incentive to prioritise it alongside attainment.
• Family engagement should be treated as a structural design feature of CYP mental health provision, not an optional extra. Programmes that extend learning beyond the school gate and into the home should be prioritised in all commissioning frameworks, including Best Start Family Hubs, Young Futures Hubs, and Early Support Hubs.
• Accountability for public services should focus on the effectiveness of the service being delivered, with evaluation focusing on tangible impact and change rather than simply on targets related to the number of schools or CYP accessing/being offered a service.
myHappymind is willing to provide oral evidence, further data, or supplementary ROI reports on request. We can provide access to our full evaluation suite, including Kirklees, Hampshire, Bradford, and Portsmouth local authority evaluations, as well as the MHST & Schools White Paper commissioner briefings referenced above.
Contact: Laura Earnshaw, Founder & CEO | laura.earnshaw@myhappymind.org | 01625 447547 | myhappymind.org
Awards & Recognition: King’s Award for Enterprise (2025) | BETT Award for Transformational Impact (2026) | BESA Transformational Impact Award | NIA Fellowship | NHS Innovation Accelerator | NHS Backed | Certified B Corporation