Are Schools Helping Teen Mental Health – or Sometimes Contributing to the Problem?

There is no doubt that schools take mental health more seriously than they did a decade ago. Many now have counsellors, wellbeing leads, mindfulness programmes and dedicated pastoral teams. These are all positive developments and have undoubtedly helped many young people.

But I sometimes wonder whether we're asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, "How do we support pupils when they are struggling?", should we also be asking, "Why are so many pupils struggling in the first place?"

Teenagers today face pressures that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Academic expectations continue to grow, public examinations carry enormous weight, and social media means that comparison, criticism and the pressure to "perform" rarely end when the school day finishes. Add to that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, changing ideas about careers and an increasingly uncertain future, and it's easy to see why many young people feel overwhelmed.

Schools cannot solve all of these problems. Nor should they be expected to.

However, schools do have a responsibility to ask whether some aspects of education unintentionally add to these pressures. Do we place too much emphasis on grades? Do we celebrate resilience while giving pupils little time to recover? Are we equipping young people to think critically about social media, AI and the digital world they inhabit, or are we assuming they'll simply work it out for themselves?

Supporting mental health is about far more than having a counsellor available when things go wrong. It is about creating a culture where young people feel known, valued and able to succeed without believing that every assessment, every post and every setback defines who they are.

Perhaps the challenge for schools over the next decade is not simply to respond better to poor mental health, but to ask what they can do to prevent it in the first place.