Not making it better: formal education and mental ill health

Posted on 24/07/2025

FORUM 67.2  Summer 2025 

The prevalence of mental ill health among young people is on the rise. FORUM’s summer number addresses the way the school system is implicated, and, as Patrick Yarker writes, how it must change.

Several articles in the summer 2025 number of FORUM consider the complex, multifaceted and always-concerning issue of the rise in mental ill health among the school population. The extent of the problem is well-founded. Of the regular large-scale surveys carried out by the NHS into children and young people’s mental health in England, the most recent was undertaken in 2017. It indicated that one in eight young people aged 5 to 19 had a mental health disorder. As children progressed through the school system the numbers experiencing mental ill health increased, from about 5 pr cent of 2 to 4 year olds to almost 17 per cent of 17-19 year olds.[1] In particular, there was an increase in ‘emotional disorders’. Follow-up research in 2023 suggested that one in five children aged 8 to 16 had a ‘probable mental disorder’.[2]

Mental health charities working with young people report that mental ill health is more common amongst those young people who identify as LGBTQ+ in a society not yet free from prejudice or hatred towards those who do not conform to heterosexual norms. Anxiety around gender, and the impact of racism, may play a further part in intensifying distress. Other social factors such as poverty, and in particular poor housing and food insecurity, as well as anxiety about large-scale challenges such as global heating and climate change, also contribute to young people’s mental ill health. Beyond the power of the school to eradicate, these objective pressures nevertheless play out in the lives of pupils and students, and contribute to the nature of the encounter between them and their school.

Unsurprisingly, there are links between mental ill health and school absence. A government report published in May 2025 noted that mental ill health is one factor causing absence in Year 11 students, and that poorer mental health strongly predicts authorised absence.[3] Children and young people who suffer mental ill health are more likely to refuse school.[4] The Children’s Commissioner drew attention in November 2023 to the generally high levels of absenteeism, especially at Key Stage 4, where a third of pupils were either persistently or severely absent for at least one year.[5] These levels continue.

The high-stakes public testing regime (from supposedly low-key baseline and phonics tests, through SATs to GCSE and other exams) and the approach to teaching-and-learning enforced by the existence of this regime, and overseen coercively by Ofsted, implicate the current school system in the rise of mental ill health among the young.[6]  The summer number of FORUM foregrounds this issue.

It is an argument that has struggled to gain traction, though not for want of trying. Campaign groups such as ‘More Than A Score’ have made the case for many years that SATs narrow the curriculum, put off young people and distort the experience of primary school. The National Education Union (NEU) regularly debates the need for a boycott of SATs and a thorough overhaul of the whole public testing system, if not its abolition. Yet the system remains, as high stakes as ever. More and more public money funds it, with a portion continuing to trickle its way into private pockets via the intricate channels of the commercial awarding bodies. Money is to be made in the standard way (one might almost say profligately) from high-stakes testing, too. The importance in society of the assessment system and its mechanisms as currently established gives the seal of approval to all kinds of commodities now readily marketed in relation to it, from textbooks and workbooks to private tutoring.

An education system which must concentrate so doggedly on attainment – and hence on the ‘attainment gap’ – can only neglect other equally necessary aspects of its mission which lie beyond the scope of measurable outcomes. The question of what makes for an educated person is not answered, but avoided, by flourishing a sheaf of test scores.

Overly in thrall to ‘attainment’, the current system requires of young people that they shape themselves to its intransigent demands. This makes it more difficult for some to feel comfortable, welcome, secure and respected in school. For a proportion of these young people, the felt rigours of attending school will exacerbate their mental ill health.

FORUM argues that lowering the stakes for attainment, and enabling schools to be relieved of the constraints imposed by high-stakes public testing and the exam obsession, would allow more generous, humane and rewarding educational opportunities to be offered to young people. This would help ameliorate the way they see school and their place and scope in it.

The opening article in the summer number lays bare the sheer hard work required of pupils who attain ‘poorly’ as they try to present themselves in the manner their school deems acceptable. The experience of pupils such as these helps illustrate that the way schools are set up, primarily as qualifications and credentials factories organised along fixed ‘ability’ lines, can make some people ill. As currently configured, the school system generates or exacerbates the kinds of mental distress that may result in a small proportion of pupils and students persistently not attending, with all the adverse consequence that follow. To expect people to come to a place which makes them consistently unhappy, or which subjects them to what they find they cannot endure, is no basis for policy.

Notes

[1] See: Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2017 [PAS] – NHS England Digital

[2] Part 1: Mental health – NHS England Digital

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/relationship-between-mental-ill-health-and-absence-in-students-aged-13-to-16

[4] See: Understanding the mental health landscape in England : Mentally Healthy Schools

[5] Children’s Commissioner, Missing Children, Missing Grades, London, November 2023, p5: https://assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2023/11/CC-REPORT-_-Attendance-and-Attainment-_-Oct-23.pdf

[6] See: Mental health, wellbeing and personal development in schools – House of Lords Library