All too often, we try to help a child who is distressed at school by encouraging them to understand what they are “doing wrong” and learn how to change. We may want them to be more respectful, more resilient, less anxious. “Nicer”.

But what if the answer is not about trying to help that individual to change, in whatever capacity? What if the answer is largely about creating a healthier school environment for that individual?

The mental health of young people in the UK, and indeed across the developed world, is becoming progressively worse. Although the pandemic of recent times has undoubtedly had an impact on just about everyone, mental health has been declining in young people for far longer than we have been dealing with Covid.

In 2019, before the pandemic began, nearly a quarter of UK teenagers were struggling with significant mental health issues. That is an alarming percentage. Moreover, the UK Centre for Mental Health reports that one in six school-aged children has a mental health problem in current times: a noticeable rise from one in 10 in 2004 and one in nine in 2017.

Experts have hypothesised that the rapid increase in social media use among children and teens is a contributing factor to their decreasing wellbeing. Certainly, there appears to be a relationship between excessive online use (more than four hours a day) and poor mental health.

In 2018, the Pew Research Centre reported that 95 per cent of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45 per cent report being online “almost constantly”. Still, many young people report benefits of social media use. Pew also found that 81 per cent of the 743 teens surveyed reported that social media makes them feel more connected to their friends’ lives. In addition, two-thirds of the teens surveyed said that these platforms made them feel as if they had people who would support them through tough times.

Social-media use in teenage years is arguably more a magnifying glass for underlying mental health, positive or negative, than it is a driving force. I believe the best support we can give young people for a healthy online life is therefore to ensure that they are experiencing a healthy life offline. One of the most important offline contexts for young people is, of course, school.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that another parallel running in line with the decrease in young people’s wellbeing is a reported decrease in their sense of belonging at school. In fact, the 2015 Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) findings identified a significant decline in UK students’ sense of belonging at school over the past 10 years. Moreover, young people have also reported more school-related anxiety over the past 15 years and less engagement in their learning.

These findings are noticeably at odds with the growing belief that education needs to support social and emotional learning, as well as academic competencies. In 2021, parents and educators desperately want young people to leave school with great grades and a sense of wellbeing. They want them to move into adult life with self-determination, motivation, a love of learning and confidence.

Today’s world, with its focus on happiness and meaning, has seen a broadening of our understanding of what it means to be successful in our careers and in life. Consequently, parents around the world are starting to define “good” schools not just in terms of academic outcomes and extracurricular opportunities but also in terms of their explicit support of wellbeing; creatively, socially and emotionally.

Duty of care

Indeed, schools and colleges have the perfect opportunity and, arguably, a real duty of care to help young people socially and emotionally, not just academically. Schools may not be wholly responsible for the problems of any single young person but they need to be part of their solution.

Therein lies the rub. We are living in a time where schools have never talked so much about supporting young people’s mental health but young people’s mental health has never been so precarious.

Schools certainly put time, effort and money into teaching pupils how to be happy and healthy, as well as academically successful. However, as we now well know, it is one thing to have great intentions about developing the whole child, it is another thing entirely to bring these intentions to fruition.

Just about every school in the developed world has adopted a wellbeing strategy or programme, yet more and more young people are finishing their school days exhausted, demotivated and distressed. It seems that, for young people right now, school days are certainly not the happiest days of their lives.

I believe that a lot of wellbeing programmes are failing to support student wellbeing for three key reasons. First, they invariably rely on a flipping of therapeutic models designed to help people recover from poor mental health. Invariably a teacher or other professional will “teach” pupils about the skills and knowledge required to live life well. However, unlike in traditional therapy settings, the pupils are rarely - if ever - given the opportunity to choose to attend these sessions. Therapists the world over know that without buy-in from clients, therapy rarely works well. When it comes to en-masse wellbeing therapy, we are teaching to reluctant, disengaged audiences.

Second, the teaching of wellbeing in a number of schools is generally conducted with a firm belief that the onus for being well lies in each pupil’s ability to learn certain skills and knowledge. This belief fails because wellbeing is not wholly an individual responsibility. As social beings, we are all partly responsible for the wellbeing of others. As such, it is vital that schools do not fail to attend to social and environmental factors because they are hung up on individual outcomes.

We want every individual to be at their best but with the understanding that every individual is primarily a social being, attending school in a social context.

Third, the teaching of wellbeing in some schools is failing because of a lack of consideration of context. If the messages of a wellbeing programme are not reflected in the fabric of everyday school life, they quickly seem meaningless and detached from reality.

If we really want to turn things around and find a better way, we have to switch our attention to what I call contextual wellbeing and the development of healthy school contexts, not simply the development of wellbeing programmes.

The school context includes the policies, practices and social norms that guide staff and pupil behaviour, shape culture and build a sense of community, in and out of the classroom. It includes the people who make up the school community: the pupils, the staff and the parents, and their relationships with each other. And it includes the school’s physical environment; the physical spaces and places in which the pupils live and learn.

Unhealthy practices abound in many schools. So much so, that it is little surprise to see so many young people despondent and struggling. I see primary school children who are repeatedly required to put their hands on their heads to show they are listening. This means the well-behaved kids are holding up aching arms as others take their time. I see other primary children competing against each other for coveted trophies and prizes - or I see every child given a prize at every event, which is equally bad. Whether it be for one child or many, the relentless focus that schools place on prizes, awards and high grades results in children of all ages working for the approval of others rather than working to become their best selves.

I see the mountains of homework that secondary students have to carry around in their oversized backpacks, despite minimal evidence for the benefit of homework in supporting learning outcomes. I see teenagers excluded because they are being disruptive, despite the fact that their disruption signals their lack of inclusion.

Everywhere I look, it seems that the education system is run on strategies that promote obedience, control and the need to work hard. In the context of misplaced practices such as these, disengagement, distress and a desire to escape the classroom - and sometimes even life - at the earliest chance are all too common. We have to challenge and change the social context of our schools if we are ever to make a significant difference. It is not enough to see wellbeing as some form of Band-Aid add-on, or some inequitable competition that no one can ultimately win.

Many of us - school leaders, teachers, parents - are deeply concerned. Yet, very few seem willing to consider that reforming toxic school practices could support pupil wellbeing far more effectively than any brightly lit programme claims to do.

More than a few teachers continue with the outdated and unhealthy context in our school communities simply because it “has always been that way”. Some do not know what else to do. Others may declare that their classroom-based policies and practices are worth continuing because they get good results. But what does a “good result” actually mean?

I imagine that most parents feel confident that their children are in good educational hands at the start of the school year. I would also expect that many of these same parents end up feeling frustrated when, at the end of the school year, their children would rather be anywhere but in their “great” school, doing anything but “getting a good education”.

The well-intentioned strategies of some British schools are all too frequently superficial or irrelevant to the actual development of self-determination and wellbeing in their students. They are not embedded in the pupils’ experience of real-world living, and they ignore one of the biggest problems of modern education - the obsessive focus on outcomes. We cannot nurture a school social system based on competition, control and outcomes and then expect to be able to teach pupils effectively about collaboration, autonomy and process. Moreover, we should not promote a dysfunctional system that alienates pupils and then tries to paper over this bleak fact by lauding the highest grades of those who succeed.

Context is king

I believe our attempts to understand young people cannot succeed if we do not consider the context in which they spend their school week, every Monday to Friday. Too often, if a pupil is unmotivated, disengaged and disruptive in the classroom, we ask: “What’s wrong with them?” But perhaps the answer is nothing. They may simply be responding to a context that is non-nurturing, unhealthy or unhelpful.

They may be struggling with their academic learning, as many disruptive kids do. Or they may feel they have no autonomy because they are always being told what to do, which is often seen as the only way to achieve order and compliance in the classroom.

Alternatively, they may be struggling to belong in a social world from which they are largely excluded. Consider how many teachers choose to send a disruptive child out of the room rather than bringing them in closer.

It is time we expanded our definition of wellbeing to include the context around us, to help all children have their needs met, equitably and fairly, every day. I believe that wellbeing is an interplay between our best individual self and our best environment. Happiness and success are far more than individual pursuits or even individual responsibilities. Sustained wellbeing develops from the ongoing creation of healthy connections to others and to the world around us.

Happiness is a positive state of wellbeing resulting from our connection to a social environment that supports and nurtures us to become the best we can be. It is time that schools reassessed what really matters in education. I hope educators will be brave enough to actively change school systems so that they better nurture agency, belonging and a sense of ongoing competency in everyone.

Dr Helen Street is an honorary research fellow at the Graduate School of Education, University of Western Australia, and founder and chair of The Positive Schools Initiative

This article originally appeared in the 4 June 2021 issue under the headline “The best days of their lives?”