The education and health secretaries, Bridget Phillipson and Wes Streeting recently announced that students will be offered sessions to address anxiety and low mood.This action in response to the youth mental health crisis is encouraging, but it is important that we consider its broader context if we are going to do more than paper over the cracks.
Origins of a crsis
From 2010, the tenure of Michael Gove as education secretary was premised on a return to ‘rigour’ which stripped away coursework, devalued creative subjects and intensified high-stakes testing. This narrowed education’s purpose and sidelined emotional wellbeing in favour of exam results.
At the same time, social media channels such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat have reshaped young people’s social lives. The impact of this is particularly evident in secondary and post-16 education settings.
Research from the Children’s Commissioner for England and NHS shows that screen time and social media use are strongly linked to rising anxiety, depression, sleep disruption and body image issues.
Social media in general fuels a culture of unrealistic comparison, and rather than offering respite, schools often replicate these pressures with competitive academic environments that compound students’ stress.
Simply put, young people are more connected at school and at home than ever before, but they’re lonelier than ever.
Adaptive education
The online safety act and new safeguarding guidance may help, but the long-term solution is not to pretend social media or mobile phones do not exist, to ban them or to prevent students from using them. Instead, we need to counteract the effects with something more powerful: meaningful connection, self-discovery and real-world engagement.
Schools can embed regular outdoor learning and physical activity into the curriculum to reconnect children with their bodies, nature and the real world. These experiences ground all of us, not just our students; they lower stress and help reset overstimulated and overworked minds.
Schools should also create time for students to talk, collaborate and build relationships in safe, supported environments. When children learn to interact offline, they gain confidence and empathy that social media rarely nurtures.
Parallel to this, when students are online, they need to know how to critically engage with the online world, manage their emotions and recognise unhealthy patterns. Schools have a role to play in this learning as much as in academic exploration. After all, it is our job to develop young people into the independent thinkers, innovators and leaders we need for the future.
As educators, it is also within our gift to ensure that young people have access to high-quality extra-curricular activities such as music, drama, sport and art which allow students to express themselves authentically, not for likes or followers but for joy and self-fulfilment.
In sum, new government initiatives, additional sessions and resources are a positive first step, but they are not enough. We are raising a generation immersed in a digital world while being restricted to an outdated model of education. It is no wonder that so many are checking out from school, mentally, emotionally and physically.
The upcoming curriculum and assessment review represents an opportunity, but only if it has been willing to ask the right questions.
Revolution, not evolution
Any new approach must have the courage to truly let go of an outdated and uninspiring curriculum. Outdoor learning and proper physical activity, as well as supportive spaces for reflective mindfulness should be mandatory in all schools.
This will enable students to develop resilience, creativity and positive wellbeing, but also to perform better academically because they will be healthier and happier while at school.
Our model has been focused on the wrong things for too long: high-pressure, memory-based assessment that undermine students’ mental health and wellbeing.
We have been promised evolution, not revolution, but the fact is that we need a complete redesign of the system if our aim is truly to have a significant, transformational impact on students’ wellbeing and a reduction in referrals to our alternative provision settings.
Many of our students who attend these settings have been let down by the mainstream curriculum. It should come as no surprise that, for the majority, no longer being bound by a restrictive and uninspiring curriculum results in a shift in their mental mindset and in their outcomes.
To achieve this change across all schools, undoing the damage caused by Gove-era policies is essential, but equally, we must rise to the challenge of our time: an anxious generation growing up online without the tools to process what they are experiencing.
The mental health crisis won’t go away as long as exams are the sole measure of worth, time outdoors and creative enrichment are optional rather than essential, and children are prepared to pass a test rather than thrive in the world they inhabit.
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