In the last two weeks, I have probably said about six or seven times, ‘Why haven’t you told me this earlier?” says Shabnam Ahmed.
Ahmed is head of English at County Upper School in Bury St Edmunds, where she has observed an increase in students, especially girls, struggling with their mental health as a result of the pandemic. All too often, she says, they weren’t speaking up about the problem until they reached a crisis point.
“Post Covid, there have been lots and lots more tears than usual,” she adds.
Amy Forrester is the director of behaviour at Cockermouth School in Cumbria, and she echoes Ahmed’s experience, especially when it comes to girls.
“Anecdotally at least, it’s certainly the case that there are more girls having extreme difficulties with their mental health and wellbeing,” she says. “We have noticed this in areas such as eating disorders, anxiety and panic attacks.”
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The picture is similar across the country, as research published in February this year by STEER Education shows.
The Navigating the road to adolescence: young people’s mental health in the UK report analysed online responses from students in 92 state secondary schools twice a year between 2014 and December 2021 and concluded that secondary school girls’ mental health is now “at a precipice”.
It found that four in five girls were hiding their feelings post-Covid, up from three in five before the pandemic. Girls’ ability to react to life’s challenges in a proportionate and measured way has also been affected: it has lowered by 33 per cent from before the pandemic, while for boys the decline has been 15 per cent.
And this isn’t only a UK problem. In Denmark, a large investigation run by UNESCO and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Responses to Educational Disruption Survey (REDS), found that the pandemic hit girls particularly hard.
Jacob Højgaard Christensen, the vice director of the National Centre for School Research at Aarhus University, coordinated the research. Focusing on Grade 8 students (aged between 14 and 15-years-old), the report found that while the emotional wellbeing of all Danish students was on par with the other 12 participating countries, the gender differences were quite stark.
“When you divide [the average] into gender, you can see that Danish boys had the highest reported level of emotional wellbeing compared to other countries, while Danish girls had the lowest,” Christensen explains.
“We know from yearly wellbeing studies that girls in Denmark have a lower level of wellbeing, especially in the higher grades, so it’s not particularly surprising. But this shows an even lower level.”
Mental health: Why are girls more vulnerable?
So, what is it that makes girls more vulnerable to mental health issues? And why has the pandemic made things so much worse?
Clinical psychologist Dr Tara Porter says that, generally speaking, girls tend to internalise their feelings, while boys do the opposite.
“Boys who feel sad and lonely and anxious tend to often act out, as a generalisation, and they tend to get excluded, they might get into petty crime, they might become disenfranchised from school,” she explains. “Whereas girls tend to take it inwards and blame themselves: [they think] they are weird, they are bad, they get everything wrong and it’s their fault.”
This tendency, she adds, could have made girls particularly sensitive to some of the changes brought about by the Covid crisis. Their propensity to internalise pain may have been exacerbated by the isolation of lockdown. Away from their friends and the wider world, from people and experiences that can give a sense of perspective, negative thoughts may have spiralled out of control.
At the same time, trying to live with change in a world which seems to be out of control, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, may have given rise to unhealthy coping mechanisms, says Porter.
“In times of change, people seek control in what they can control, to have a sense of security and quell the anxiety. We have seen an absolutely massive increase in eating disorders, and I think this is related to that,” she explains.
The STEER study suggests that other factors could also have been at play throughout the pandemic: girls may have been more anxious about the health emergency, used social media more passively than boys, and engaged more in unhealthy thinking patterns.
For Andy Mellor, the national director of wellbeing for the School Advisory Service, social media is almost certainly a contributing factor. He believes that increased exposure, coupled with a lack of genuine conversations with friends, may have hit girls particularly hard.
“I think we have always known that girls’ mental health is exacerbated by aspects of social media that have existed prior to the pandemic…[that are] very much about portraying a certain way that you should look, a way that you should dress. That level of peer pressure was ramped up during the pandemic, because everything went online and the incidental face-to-face communication disappeared to a large extent.”
The figures highlighted in these reports are alarming, but we’re just at the start of the post-pandemic years. Could things get worse in the years to come?
Potentially, says Mellor: “I think there will be other things to come out of the woodwork in the next five to seven years, and we need to be aware of them.”
The STEER study predicts the long-term effect of the Covid crisis will likely be seen in pathologies of internalised self-control, manifesting as anxiety and behaviours such as perfectionism, controlled eating and self-harm, and predicts this will particularly affect girls aged 14-18.
Meanwhile, Mellor thinks it is likely that teachers will also need to keep an eye on younger children, those in Year 1 and Year 2, whose start of the school experience has not been anything like normal.
And while there are clearly issues around girls’ mental health in particular, schools shouldn’t overlook the fact that boys might be finding things hard, too.
“If you look at the deaths by suicide figures, boys consistently show up higher than girls,” Porter says. “This suggests that we possibly are not recognising boys who are struggling quite as well as we do in girls, or girls feel more able to come forward.”
How can schools support students?
So, how can schools and teachers support students of all ages - boys and girls - with their mental health?
One important step, according to Mellor, is to make it easy for young people to seek and find help.
“I have spoken to some schools recently who came up with great ideas of how that might work, particularly in a secondary context,” he explains. “They have been posting QR codes around school so that anybody with a phone can just click on that QR code, and it registers them with somebody to see either a counsellor or the wellbeing lead in the school.”
Students should also be given the tools to understand when a state of mind becomes problematic, says Ahmed.
“[We should be] teaching students how to self-identify. When does low mood become depression? When does worrying become anxiety? What sorts of things could they be doing? Even little indicators such as ‘I am not eating as I was before’, ‘I cry more than I was’, ‘I don’t sleep much’ - those things that they really need to be aware of,” she explains.
At the same time, schools also need to be on the lookout for the quieter students who may feel unable to speak up, even once they are equipped with these tools, says Simon Antwis, the senior education consultant at STEER and a former headteacher and school inspector.
“Don’t mistake quietness or compliance for no concern,” he advises. “Use open questions or reflective comments to help pupils open up. For example: ‘How are you finding things since the pandemic? It looks like your friendship group has changed a bit this term.’”
Crucially, though, schools can’t do this work alone, says Forrester: more funding and support is needed.
“It is an ever-increasing worry for me that there is a chronic underfunding and under-resourcing of agencies such as Camhs. Male or female, we need to ensure that we can meet the emerging needs of our young people in a prompt and effective way,” she says.
“At present, despite the excellent work of Camhs and medical professionals, the very real issues of under-funding are having real-world consequences in contributing to the decline in emotional and mental wellbeing for our students.”
For Porter, however, there is one thing that teachers can do right now that wouldn’t cost anything, but could make a difference: change the messages that they are sending to students.
“Through international rankings such as Pisa, countries are competing with each other on who’s getting the best results, which children are getting the higher standards, and then schools are under scrutiny for their results, teachers are under individual scrutiny, and I think all this pressure can be communicated to children,” Porter explains.
The key message to pass on is that while putting effort into schoolwork is important, the focus, first and foremost, should be wellbeing.
“I think schools should give students every opportunity to live their best life, not just to do their best or be their best,” says Porter.
This, she recognises, is tough for teachers: there are societal pressures which mean that there’s a huge emphasis on measurable outcomes like exam grades.
As the full picture of how the pandemic has affected mental health emerges, it’s clear we don’t have all the answers. Funding pressures, oversubscribed mental health services and the societal pressures on the education system are all factors beyond teachers’ control.
However, sending students a clear message that wellbeing should always come first is a step that doesn’t cost the world, and seems like a good place to start.
