In December 2024 we published a report on ‘Exploring the Efficacy of Growing2gether on Mental Health, Education and Behavioural Outcome (2017-2023) ‘ and we asked Highland Councils Educational Psychology team if they would peer review the report.
The peer review includes comments from the team and we are grateful to Bernadatte Cairns, and her team for supporting us with this. Please see an excerpt below.
We thought the report was well-written and clearly structured with relevant links to theory and other literature.
The introduction section clearly signposted the reader and the sections linking Growing2gether to relevant theory and literature concerning areas such as mental wellbeing and connectedness, self-esteem, social-emotional learning and growth mindset were very successful. We thought this theory section was very good, as was the strong justification provided for creating and undertaking the intervention.
We remarked on how powerful the case studies were towards the end of the report – particularly the comments from the young people – and considered these valuable additions. They also provided us with further information about the content of the intervention and we wondered if this could have been elaborated on nearer the beginning of the report. For example, how the young people and children were selected and paired, what the interactions between the young person and child looked like, how often they occurred and the role of the facilitator. We felt this would help us better understand the key features of Growing2gether that make it so effective.
