Publication type
Report
Authors
Publication date
November 15, 2019
Summary:
Mental health problems such as depression and anxiety are common in secondary school children. Recent survey data show that approximately one in seven young people age 11 to 16 will have issues serious enough to impact on their day-to-day lives1. Improving prevention and early intervention is a key part of the recent Green paper on young people’s mental health2.
Inevitably, for 11 to 16 year olds, this will involve the school setting. It seems clear from listening to young people that their mental health at age 13 or 14 is likely to be bound up with school experiences, and that this might make a difference when they sit their exams at 16. However there is an extraordinary lack of good longitudinal evidence using ‘real world’ data to test this assumption. This study set out to use these kinds of data to test whether mental health problems have a separate, independent effect on educational outcomes, once we’ve controlled for all the other things that cause both mental health problems and academic underachievement, such as family income and social factors. This briefing sets out some of the preliminary findings.
Subjects
Link
#536749