This September, we attended the Psychology of Education Annual Conference 2025, where we engaged with academics in active discussion about advancing ASPbelong and the barriers to implementing this digital, mental health intervention in schools across multiple countries.

Lina is ‘augmented social play’ that involves immersive storytelling and puzzles that is a smartphone-enabled psychotherapeutic intervention for early adolescence. From September 2025, Lina has been implemented in 40 classes each in Czechia, Portugal and the UK as part of a randomised control trial. The design of the digital classroom experience is vital in creating an experience that will keep adolescents engaged and boost a sense of belonging in the classroom.

We developed protocol (implementation strategies) alongside expert co-researchers in Czechia, Portugal and the UK that focused on national, regional and local level policies, as we believe that we need to align ourselves with each country according to their own policies because different educational environments may see Lina differently. Building trust within communities creates meaningful bonds, which is why we have begun to gradually implement Lina in three countries after much care and consideration to provide the best version of Lina that we can.

We highlighted the importance of overcoming the barriers to the implementation of a digital intervention such as ASPbelong, by understanding that adolescents are the most important part of our intervention, but we cannot forget the importance of our stakeholders: parents, teachers and policymakers, as they are also a big part of making sure this intervention can run smoothly overtime. Addressing the barriers that stakeholders may have about unwillingly implementing ASPbelong showed us that we need to create tailored messaging for different audiences and practical implementation strategies to deliver Lina in classrooms.