SCYPHeR Grand Round: Education with Dr Anna Weighall and Dr Katherine Easton
Event details
-
Tuesday 4 November 2025 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Description
We are pleased to invite you to the next session in our SCYPHeR Grand Round series. The Education and Skills Centre at Sheffield Children's Hospital is accessible via the Damer Street entrance. You can also join on Microsoft Teams.
Our speakers will present their work on children and Education.
Bridging Education and Child Health: Collaborative Research to Improve Outcomes for Children and Young People in South Yorkshire
Dr Anna Weighall, Reader in Psychology and Education at the University of Sheffield
Health and education are deeply interconnected, yet research, policy, and practice often treat them separately. In South Yorkshire, where health inequalities and deprivation rates are among the highest in the country, there is a unique opportunity to bridge these worlds to create lasting impact for children and young people. In this talk, Anna will showcase how collaborative, community-based approaches can be used to address complex child health challenges, drawing on the expertise within the School of Education at the University of Sheffield and their partnerships with schools, families, and healthcare providers. She will share examples of co-produced research and innovative methodologies, including: a waitlist intervention with Prof. Heather Elphick to improve early access to sleep support; regional work to co-design new community pathways for child health and wellbeing. Anna will share ideas about the potential for research with families with children who have neurodevelopmental disorders, including ways in which we could work together to intervene and ameliorate the current challenges in diagnosis and support, through integrating educational and health perspectives. Anna will highlight how including educational outcomes alongside health measures can enrich evaluation, strengthen the evidence base, and ensure interventions are meaningful to children, families, and schools. By embedding research within communities, and valuing the lived experience of those we serve, we can develop solutions that are equitable, scalable, and sustainable, improving both health and life chances for the next generation.
Young Minds, Digital Worlds: Exploring Education, Mental Health, and the Internet of Things through Storytelling and Futures Thinking
Dr Kat Easton, Applied Social Psychologist at the University of Sheffield
As schools increasingly adopt digital technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming classrooms into spaces of both opportunity and surveillance. Smart sensors, cameras, and data-driven systems promise safety and efficiency but also risk undermining trust and autonomy. For young people, being constantly monitored can shape not only how they learn but how they feel about themselves and their place in school. These experiences carry significant consequences for mental health, raising questions about stress, belonging, agency, and freedom in digitally mediated education.
DigiWare, a collaborative project with schools in the North of England, responds to these concerns by foregrounding the perspectives of young people. Rather than treating mental health narrowly, the project explores it as a lived experience, affected by both the structures of schooling and the invisible infrastructures of technology. Through storytelling and participatory workshops, young people are invited to share their present realities while imagining futures shaped by IoT. A central feature of DigiWare is its focus on utopias and dystopias. Students are asked to imagine the best and worst possible futures of education: schools where digital tools enhance care, equity, and autonomy, and schools where technologies intensify surveillance, anxiety, and exclusion. These exercises reveal the hopes, fears, and ambivalences of young minds negotiating the benefits and risks of digital schooling. By engaging in speculative storytelling, students move from respondents to co-theorists, challenging us to rethink what education is and what it could become. Their insights expose tensions between institutional priorities of performance and safety and students’ own priorities of trust, wellbeing, and connection.
The impact of DigiWare lies in amplifying these voices to inform educators, policymakers, and designers of educational technologies. For SCYPHER, the project resonates strongly with themes of participation, education, and youth futures. It demonstrates how creative methodologies can generate nuanced understandings of how digital infrastructures affect young people’s lives and mental health, while opening space to reimagine education in ways that better support and empower young learners.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive updates on our upcoming sessions.