Mental health and wellbeing support should be added to pandemic catch-up activities in schools, according to a report published today.
The Covid Social Mobility and Opportunities (COSMO) study, led jointly by University College London and the Sutton Trust, also recommends “ring-fenced” funding for mental health services to support pupils in all schools.
This would include giving students access to independent counsellors, and preventative and early intervention services for pupils deemed most at risk or falling behind as a result of the pandemic.
Researchers surveyed a sample of 13,000 Year 11 students in 2021 and found that almost half (44 per cent) were above the threshold for “probable mental ill health”.
This represented a nine percentage point leap on 2017, and a 19 percentage point rise compared with 2007.
Around half of students from comprehensive or grammar schools rated their school’s mental health support as “not very good” or “not at all good”, compared with just under a quarter (23 per cent) of those attending independent schools.
The blame for this should not be placed solely on the pandemic, according to COSMO’s principal investigator, Dr Jake Anders.
“While it is likely that the Covid-19 pandemic has sped this trend up, we should not lay all the blame for this picture at its door,” he said. “Things were bad before, and that means there are big systematic issues that need fixing. This problem won’t get better on its own.”
Improving mental health support in schools
Last week the Department for Education revealed it was looking at setting up a national mental health lead hub for senior staff who have undergone the government-funded training, aimed at helping them to improve mental health and wellbeing support for staff and students in schools.
Meanwhile, today’s research also reveals differences between levels of mental health based on gender.
A total of 69 per cent of those who identified as non-binary or “in another way” reported high psychological distress, 61 per cent had self-harmed and 35 per cent had attempted suicide.
Girls, meanwhile, were twice as likely as boys to have attempted both self-harm (23 per cent against 11 per cent) and suicide (11 per cent against 5 per cent).
“This report shines a light on a situation with which school staff are sadly all too familiar,” said NEU teaching union joint general secretary Kevin Courtney.
“Staff are frustrated by the delays which students face in accessing specialist mental health assessment and support once wellbeing issues have been identified.
“These delays are leading to time out of school and place further stress on pupils, and the waiting times are allowing cases to become more severe.”
Gemma Byrne, policy and campaigns manager for mental health charity Mind, said the study highlights the gap between demand and government attention to the issue.
“Despite the increased need for mental health support, young people are still left facing an agonising wait in a system that cannot keep up with demand, and the UK government’s response so far has just not been good enough,” she said.
“The government’s 10-year mental health plan needs to tackle the mental health backlog, alongside additional funding to support young people experiencing mental health problems earlier on, before they reach crisis point and treatment becomes both more intensive and expensive.”
This summer research from the charitable body the Early Intervention Foundation found that more than four in five (82 per cent of) secondary school teachers had noticed increased anxiety or depressive symptoms in their students during the 2021-22 school year.
