Our Mission

STEER was founded by Dr Simon and Dr Jo Walker to build a new generation of social-emotional applications to prepare young people with the human skills to thrive in life. Combining education and psychology backgrounds they set out to solve three big challenges.

First, how to identify young people with mental health risks early, and before they need specialist support. Second, how to reliably measure the impact of schools on students social-emotional development. Third, how to empower young people with skills to steer the road of adolescence for themselves.

Our Contribution

STEER now manages the longest-running dataset of student social-emotional development in the UK. We track, signpost and safeguard students from the age of 8-18 in mainstream, specialist schools and elite sports academies. Our data, allied with more than 3,000 strategies developed by experts, gives STEER a unique ability to support teachers.

During the pandemic, we helped hundreds of schools in more than 15 countries track and support their students during lockdown. More than 10,000 teachers have completed our online training programme. We currently safeguard the mental health of more than 70,000 students.

Uniquely, we enabled the UK government to quantify the impact of lockdown on student mental heath. We published our data 18 months earlier than other organisation, and remain the only institution with pre-pandemic tracking data by which to measure Covid’s actual impact.