The inclusion of animals in educational practice is becoming increasingly popular, but it is unclear how solid the evidence for this type of intervention is. The aim of this systematic review is to scrutinise the empirical research literature relating to animal-assisted interventions conducted in educational settings. The review included 25 papers; 21 from peer-reviewed journals and 4 obtained using grey literature databases. Most studies reported significant benefits of animal-assisted interventions in the school setting. Despite this, studies vary greatly in methods and design, in intervention types, measures, and sample sizes, and in the length of time exposed to an animal. Furthermore, a worrying lack of reference to risk assessment and animal welfare must be highlighted. Taken together, the results of this review show promising findings and emerging evidence suggestive of potential benefits related to animals in school settings. The review also indicates the need for a larger and more robust evidence base driven by thorough and strict protocols. The review further emphasises the need for safeguarding for all involved—welfare and safety are paramount.

Animal-assisted interventions (AAI) in educational and other settings have steadily increased over the last fifty years and a steep rise in AAI has been observed in many countries and settings in recent years. Surprisingly, while different providers and organisations provide a range of guidelines, no unified, standardised guidelines or risk assessment tools for AAI exist. This means that in practice AAI takes place in an unregulated manner and without a gold standard of best practice. In addition, knowledge of which interventions are effective is still scarce and the mechanisms of successful interventions are not yet fully understood. This is partly due to AAI being a relatively new research field and standards of research and practice have often lacked rigour in the past. Furthermore, knowledge and experience of providers undertaking interventions varies greatly as there is no standardised training either. We address the striking lack of standardised guidelines and procedures. In all AAI, high importance should be placed on safety and welfare of all involved. Children and other AAI participants, staff and animals should be given equal consideration when assessing risks and welfare needs. To ensure safe AAI worldwide, we provide urgently needed guidelines on best practice in relation to risk assessment, safeguarding and animal welfare priorities. The guidelines were developed for a large-scale longitudinal, randomised controlled trial AAI project and are relevant to AAIs within educational and other settings. We also provide the first set of comprehensive risk assessment and animal welfare tools to achieve consistent welfare and safety standards for best practice across educational and other settings around the world.

Children diagnosed with autism face many barriers to learning. Animal Assisted Services and Interventions (AAS/AAI) have been adopted to support children within schools. The Dog Mentor is a UK-based organisation that provides training for handlers and assesses dogs to be integrated within schools. It adopts a rigorous and continuous training package and ensures the safety and welfare of all involved by adopting a whole school approach. This research uses content analysis to understand the types of activities and outcomes in The Dog Mentor programme, as established by teachers and dog handlers, across 58 schools. Teachers and dog handlers perceived that The Dog Mentor successfully supported children with autism, using a variety of sessions. This variability is seen as a benefit as it enables the intervention to be tailored to meet the needs of the students. Handler-reported benefits include creating a calm environment, promoting engagement, and supporting learning. Improved self- and emotion regulation, mental health, and resilience were also noted by the handler reports. Future research needs to investigate these perceived benefits using quantitative data, as well as look into outcomes relating to the dogs supporting others with bereavement and trauma. This topic was briefly mentioned by two of the schools, but there was not enough data to understand the impact in depth.