The Education Policy Institute has examined aspects of mental health among secondary age children and linked these to social, demographic and other key factors and influencers.
They recommend that schools are given the resources to support mental health as well as more access to training, support and guidance.
Recommendations relevant to schools and colleges:
A post-pandemic wellbeing fund is needed to enable schools to deliver additional support over the coming years, such as hiring additional staff to deliver mental health support, running interventions, improving links with CAMHS and training teachers. This would help mitigate some of the damage caused by the pandemic.
Schools should build on existing mental health content in the Health Education and Relationships and Sex Education curriculum. This should help young people to understand how different characteristics, identities, and backgrounds, and existing stereotypes around these, can affect their mental and emotional health, including beliefs about themselves.
Schools should promote evidence-based strategies to support mental health and pathways to access different types of support should be clearly laid out. Schools should engage with parents and carers to ensure they are equipped with the same knowledge. Where relevant, schools should be encouraged to work with external organisations with expertise in this area to enhance delivery.
Improve the capacity of school leaders and teachers to support children with mental and emotional health needs. School leaders should be encouraged to spend time in alternative provision (AP) settings as part of ongoing CPD or prior to entering into a leadership role.
The majority of young people in AP struggle with mental or emotional health difficulties. It is crucial for leaders to know how to best support children with additional needs, including how to employ trauma-informed approaches in the classroom, and to be able to cascade this knowledge to teaching staff.
Local Mental Health Support Teams, currently being piloted in a number of areas, should be required to deliver training to school staff to ensure that mental health support is embedded across the school community. Schools are the most important, non-stigmatised setting where young people can seek advice and support, and policymakers must ensure leaders and teachers are equipped to offer it.
There should be an evidence-based policy to prevent and tackle bullying with clear plans for funding, delivery and accountability. This could involve more evidence-based guidance from DfE for schools on preventing and tackling bullying – guidance that should be statutory to comply with Equalities legislation when bullying is based on protected characteristics, such as race, gender or (dis)ability – and/or changes to Ofsted’s inspection framework.
Evidence shows that interventions which create understanding of and accountability for harm caused by bullying are more effective than punitive action: these include anti-bias training, bystander intervention training, peer support programmes and restorative approaches.
These recommendations drew on their key findings:
- Personal wellbeing drops as children move from primary into secondary school, and continues to drop throughout secondary. The drop in wellbeing is greater for girls than for boys. Around one in seven girls report being unhappy with the way they look at the end of primary school, rising to almost one in three by age 14.
- Self-esteem falls as children move into adolescence, staying broadly similar for girls as they move into late adolescence and continuing to fall for boys. Young people highlighted the transition to secondary school as being particularly hard on their self-esteem due to increased concerns about being judged and not fitting in.
- Psychological distress increases through adolescence, with girls starting off with higher psychological distress scores and seeing a larger rise in levels of psychological distress as they move into late adolescence. Young people report an increase in levels of worry and pressure as they moved through secondary school.
- Self-esteem is strongly correlated with wellbeing and levels of psychological distress. As young people get older, how they see and value themselves becomes more closely tied to how they feel about their lives generally. This is of particular concern for girls.
- There is a graded relationship between family income and all three outcomes: wellbeing, self-esteem and psychological distress.
- Health and activities in childhood, including physical activity and social media habits, are important for all three mental health outcomes. Engaging in physical activity was found to be more important for boys’ mental and emotional health in early adolescence than girls’.
- Heavy social media use is associated with worse scores on all mental health outcomes in girls age 14 and 17, but only worse wellbeing for boys at age 14. Young people reported the positive and negative aspects of social media. While girls tended to focus on the negative impact on body image, boys felt that the images they saw on social media platforms could be aspirational.
- The social dimension of life, including quality of relationships with parents and peers, is highly important for young people’s mental and emotional health. Being bullied in childhood has strong and lasting effects on both boys’ and girls’ mental and emotional health through adolescence. Frequent arguing with parents is linked to lower wellbeing at age 17, while at age 14 it is associated with both worse wellbeing and higher psychological distress.
- Controlling for academic ability, being placed in the bottom stream in primary school is associated with slightly lower self-esteem scores in boys at age 14, but not girls, supporting existing evidence of the socially stigmatising effect of being placed in low performance streams.
- Young people spoke about how relationships can affect mental health in positive and negative way: open and supportive relationships are beneficial, while rocky relationships with family and friends can be damaging.
- Family health and wellbeing is also highly important for young people’s mental health. Poor maternal health is predictive of worse scores on all three outcomes in both girls and boys at age 14, and maternal depression in infancy is associated with higher levels of psychological distress in girls at age 17.
- Wider community factors were found to play a role as well. Girls who feel unsafe in their neighbourhood were found to be at increased risk of worse wellbeing and higher levels of psychological distress.
Summary of the methods used:
Qualified mental health support in schools: The School Mental Health Specialist
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