In light of the dramatic rise in mental health disorders amongst adolescents seen in the past decade across the world, there is an urgent need for robust evidence on what works to combat this trend. This paper provides the first robust evaluation of the impacts on school outcomes of 6-year funding programme (HeadStart) for area-level mental health interventions for adolescents. Exploiting educational administrative data on ten cohorts of state-educated secondary school students, we use the synthetic control method to construct counterfactual outcomes for areas that received the funding. We show that the funding did not affect students’ absenteeism or academic attainment, but it prevented around 800 students (c. 10% of students typically excluded yearly) from being excluded in its first year. The transient nature of this effect suggests that sustained funding for intervention may be a necessary but not sufficient condition to maintain programme effectiveness over time.

鉴于过去十年来世界各地青少年心理健康障碍急剧增加，迫切需要强有力的证据来证明如何有效地应对这一趋势。本文首次对地区级青少年心理健康干预的 6 年资助计划 ( HeadStart ) 对学校成绩的影响进行了强有力的评估。利用十组受过公立教育的中学生的教育行政数据，我们使用综合控制方法为接受资助的地区构建反事实结果。我们发现，这笔资金并没有影响学生的缺勤或学业成绩，但它阻止了大约 800 名学生（通常每年排除 10% 的学生）在第一年被排除在外。这种效应的短暂性表明，持续的干预资金可能是长期维持计划有效性的必要条件，但不是充分条件。