It shocked me to learn that now one in 20 young people aged 16 to 21 in England have no close friends. Just over a decade ago, it was one in 100.
These figures, taken from a recent IPPR report, shine a light on a generation growing up amid the loss of youth services and free places to connect.
Peter Fonagy also points to these challenges in his nuanced review of mental health, which concludes that the rise in distress among young people since the 1990s is very real. As he told BBC News: “To the person who says it’s a snowflake generation, just try living 24 hours as a 16-year-old.”
None of this will surprise school leaders. They know that a building full of children does not guarantee connection, and they know the difference between a pupil who enjoys solitude and one who has nobody to turn to. The question is what we do about it.
Responding to youth loneliness
Too often, our answer to a struggling young person is to try to “fix” the child. Interventions are framed around what a child lacks. And the implicit message to “try harder” is unhelpful for young people whose real experience we have not listened to closely enough.
Fonagy’s review is optimistic. He hopes that young people in distress “will receive broader support and advice at the earliest opportunity, without having to wait for a clinical diagnosis”.
That’s good. But it also exposes how far our overwhelmed systems are built around diagnosing and fixing individuals, rather than examining the conditions they are growing up in.
For example, sports clubs, music lessons and somewhere to spend Saturday afternoon all cost money that not every family has. The under-16 social media ban arrives in spring 2027, yet there is no coherent plan for how schools and families will support that change. “Put your phone down and go outside” sounds straightforward. But go where?
Rather than trying to “fix” children, I’d like to frame the challenge differently. How can the system become more intentional in developing relational practice? Can we achieve a double whammy of happy, healthy children who thrive both in academic outcomes and in social and emotional confidence? These are not trade-offs. They are both possible and interconnected.
When children are measured against a gap, they learn that they are the problem. It is hardly surprising that some then hold back from their peers. A crowded corridor can be a lonely place when you are frightened, struggling to find your footing or not allowed to speak.
Constant scrutiny is not healthy for friendships. They tend to flourish in low-stakes moments, shared tasks, unstructured time, where talk is for fun, not judgement.
Schools already create many of these moments through the ordinary mechanisms of school life. What I would like to see is schools having a licence for more opportunities, designed deliberately, with an explicit purpose of helping children to feel seen and known.
A calm classroom doesn’t have to be a silent one; inclusion means an environment in which every child belongs to something bigger than themselves.
Take a reading partner intervention. If the aim is “to catch up” we add pressure through a deficit framing. The younger child knows they are there because they are behind. Pair a Year 11 with a Year 7 to draw on that child’s strengths, hear what that child needs and build a relationship, and the same activity becomes something else entirely. The difference is the explicit intent to value participation and connection. If we miss the child’s voice, we miss the mark immediately.
We teach reading, writing and so on explicitly because we do not assume that children will simply pick them up. Yet we largely leave friendship to chance.
Learning how to sustain friendships
Making friends and forming secure attachments to peers and trusted adults are learned skills. Overcoming a fall-out is something children can absorb but many do not. If we want young people to sustain friendships, schools need clear licence - and time - to teach those skills as deliberately as anything else in the curriculum, and to model them in how adults respond when things go wrong.
Youth loneliness deserves our attention. What schools and policymakers can do is change the question. Instead of asking how to close the gap for children who are “working behind” and too often assumed to be falling behind, we should ask how we can offer “greater depth” of connection for all. Fix the conditions, not the child, and more young people may find the friendships they are currently missing.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders and project director at Whole School SEND
