Mental Health and Welfare Audit

Evaluating your school's mental health and wellbeing provision requires a systematic approach that looks at culture, systems, support and leadership. This pack provides editable tools to help headteachers, SENDCos, SMHLs, pastoral leads and designated safeguarding leads assess mental health provision with confidence and create a clear action plan for improvement.

Inside, you'll find:

☑️ 38-page mental health and welfare audit document – your core self-evaluation tool, with reflective prompts and structured questions across nine key areas of mental health and wellbeing provision. Each section includes space to capture your current position, identify where you want to be, and note supporting evidence. The nine sections are:

• Leadership and Management
• Ethos and Environment
• Curriculum, Teaching and Learning
• Pupil Voice
• Staff Development and Supervision
• Identifying Need and Monitoring Interventions
• Working With Parents and Carers
• Targeted Support
• Crisis Response, Recovery and Postvention

Each section ends with a reflective summary where you can identify your provision's current developmental stage and capture key priorities for action.

☑️ 18-page mental health audit guidance document – step-by-step instructions on planning and conducting your audit, including advice on who to involve, how to gather evidence systematically, what Ofsted expects to see regarding mental health provision, and how to use your findings to inform school improvement planning.

☑️ Mental health action plan template – helps you turn audit findings into prioritised, time-bound actions with clear ownership and measurable outcomes.

☑️ Document checklist – provides a comprehensive list of policies, data sources and evidence you may need to support your audit, from wellbeing surveys to intervention logs.

☑️ Comprehensive question bank – ready-to-use survey and interview questions organised by stakeholder group (pupils, parents and carers, staff, and governors) to gather views, test assumptions and inform your self-evaluation.

☑️ One-page summary template – distils your key findings, strengths and priorities into a concise format perfect for presenting to governors, trustees or senior leadership team meetings.

All resources come in fully editable Word .docx format apart from the PDF guidance, so you can adapt them for your school's specific context, whether you're a small primary, large secondary or special school.

This pack is designed for headteachers, deputy heads, senior mental health leads (SMHLs), SENDCos, pastoral leads and designated safeguarding leads (DSLs) who are responsible for evaluating and improving mental health provision.

It's particularly valuable if you're responding to concerns about pupil or staff wellbeing, or want to take a systematic approach to reviewing this crucial area of school life.

Trustees, MAT leaders and governors will also find this useful when scrutinising how effectively the school supports mental health and wellbeing across the community. This audit is essential if you're developing a new mental health strategy, implementing the Senior Mental Health Lead role or reviewing provision following staff or parent feedback.

This comprehensive pack helps you tackle the most common challenges leaders face when auditing mental health and wellbeing:

"How do I know if our mental health provision is good enough?"
The 38-page audit tool covers every aspect of provision – from PSHE curriculum and pastoral systems to staff wellbeing and parental engagement – giving you a clear picture of strengths and gaps.

"How can I turn audit findings into meaningful action?"
The action plan template structures your findings into prioritised, time-bound actions with clear ownership, making it easier to drive improvement rather than just identify issues.

"Where do I even start with such a broad topic like mental health in schools?"
The document checklist and question bank break the audit into manageable sections, whilst the guidance takes you through a logical process from planning to reporting.

"How do I present findings to governors without overwhelming them?"
The one-page summary template distils your audit into key headlines, priorities and next steps – perfect for busy governance meetings.

To support your school mental health audit, these resources can help you strengthen specific aspects of your mental health provision and governance:

Personal Development and Well-being Audit – Take a broader look at your whole-school approach to personal development. This audit helps you evaluate how effectively you're developing pupils' character, resilience and wider life skills alongside their mental health and wellbeing.

Pastoral and Mental Health Role Skills Audit Pack – Ensure your pastoral and mental health leads have the skills, knowledge and capacity to fulfil their roles effectively. This pack helps you audit staff capabilities, identify training needs and plan professional development that strengthens your wellbeing provision.

Staff, Pupil and Community Welfare Link Governor Support Pack – Equip your link governor with the tools, question prompts and guidance they need to effectively scrutinise and champion mental health and wellbeing provision at governance level.

Have a look at what's in the pack here: Mental Health and Welfare Audit Pack Preview