OxWell: Wellbeing among UK adolescents | Mina Fazel | University of Oxford

Summary

Mina Fazel from the University of Oxford presents findings from the OxWell Student Survey, focusing on wellbeing among UK adolescents. The survey, involving 40,000 students from various education levels, assesses factors such as mental health, friendships, and belonging. Highlighted are the associations between friendship quality, gender, neurodiversity, and well-being. Fazel emphasizes the importance of schools in fostering mental health and belonging, suggesting targeted interventions like extracurricular activities to improve adolescent wellbeing.

Highlights

• The OxWell Survey involves a massive scale with 40,000 participants, shedding light on school-based mental health. 🏫
• Friendship quality directly influences adolescent wellbeing—better friendships correlate with better mental health. 🤝
• Gender diverse and non-disclosing students report notably lower wellbeing, highlighting a need for inclusive mental health strategies. 🌈
• Adolescent perceptions of belonging are critical, with significant impacts on wellbeing scores, especially in year 10 students. 📉
• Extracurricular activities are identified as crucial in enhancing school belonging and supporting student mental health. 🎨

Key Takeaways

• The OxWell Student Survey captures vital insights into adolescent mental health across the UK, with over 40,000 participants. 📊
• A significant finding is the link between high-quality friendships and better adolescent wellbeing, emphasizing the role of social networks. 👫
• Gender and neurodiversity significantly impact adolescents' mental health and sense of belonging, necessitating tailored approaches. 🏳️‍🌈
• Schools play a critical role in fostering wellbeing through creating an inclusive environment and offering extracurricular activities. 🏫
• Focusing on friendship and belonging in schools could potentially enhance overall wellbeing among students. 🌟

Overview

Mina Fazel, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, shares insights from the OxWell Student Survey at the University of Oxford, focusing on adolescent wellbeing. The project examines mental health interventions in schools—a complex realm impacted by factors like friendship quality, gender identity, and belonging.

The survey, involving 40,000 students from ages 8 to 18, gathers data on well-being, risk factors, and social dynamics. It highlights the significant role of friendship quality in promoting better mental health. Fazel points to the intricate connections between gender, neurodiversity, and students’ sense of belonging.

Fazel concludes by stressing the pivotal role of schools in improving adolescent wellbeing. She advocates for practical strategies like enhancing extracurricular activities and creating an inclusive environment, aiming to strengthen friendships, belonging, and overall student mental health.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Background The chapter introduces the speaker's background in medicine, particularly psychiatry, and social anthropology, identifying as a 'social psychiatrist' with a focus on mental illness. The speaker expresses interest in both mental illness and well-being and plans to present well-being research based on the Oxford Student Survey. The chapter sets the stage for a detailed discussion based on survey findings.
• 01:00 - 04:00: OxWell Survey Overview This chapter provides an overview of the OxWell Survey and focuses on school-based mental health interventions. It emphasizes the importance of understanding what occurs in schools regarding mental health support. The chapter raises questions about who provides these mental health interventions—whether it is within the school, through peers, or external mental health services such as CAMHS. Additionally, it considers the different levels at which interventions can be targeted, such as the whole school, specific classrooms, or targeted students.
• 04:00 - 07:00: Survey Methodology and Implementation The chapter titled 'Survey Methodology and Implementation' explores a variety of topics related to conducting surveys in schools. Key discussions include the importance of addressing mental health and well-being, consent, confidentiality, and the necessity of a strong evidence base. It raises questions about the intersection and responsibilities of education and health sectors in policy implementation, highlighting the lack of consensus on these issues. The chapter suggests these prevailing concerns must be addressed to effectively conduct and implement surveys in educational settings.
• 13:00 - 15:00: Friendship and Well-being Findings The chapter discusses the complexities involved in school-based mental health and highlights efforts to understand these challenges. It introduces the Oxville survey and centers on findings related to friendship and belonging, as they are considered promising starting points for improvement. The presenter expresses enthusiasm about sharing insights on these topics.
• 26:00 - 31:00: Belonging and Well-being The chapter titled 'Belonging and Well-being' focuses on the concept of networks of care and how they relate to belonging and social media. The discussion involves analyzing data from the Oxwell survey, which has recently commenced its fifth wave, involving 3,000 students. The chapter likely explores preliminary findings from the survey and discusses how feelings of belonging potentially influence well-being, especially in the context of social media. Time constraints are mentioned in relation to covering these topics in detail.
• 31:00 - 37:00: School Influence and Recommendations The chapter discusses the impact of school environments on young individuals and suggests recommendations to improve the school experience. It mentions a large-scale survey conducted in 2023, which required participants to answer between 200 and 350 questions. The survey included questions about sensitive issues, such as self-harm, and varied in length depending on the responses given. The dedication of the participants who invest significant time to provide honest feedback is acknowledged and appreciated.
• 37:00 - 40:00: Conclusion and Future Directions The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Future Directions' discusses a comprehensive study conducted in 2023 involving approximately 40,000 students from 180 different schools, ranging from primary to further education colleges. These participants, aged 8 to 18, responded to questions covering various aspects of well-being and mental health, as well as risk and protective factors. The schools involved receive specific reports and data access through a portal, encouraging a thorough examination of the findings to enhance understanding and implementation related to student mental health.

OxWell: Wellbeing among UK adolescents | Mina Fazel | University of Oxford Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 my background obviously is in medicine that's a psychiatrist but also I did social anthropology as well so however what I feel is a very social psychiatrist very interested in it although from Psychiatry I'm very interested in mental illness more than well-being but I'm going to try and present the well-being work to you but I'm open to kind of discuss more things in detail and because I'm basing everything I'm going to share with you on the oxal student survey I'm going to first tell you a little bit about that and then share some fin from the last
• 00:30 - 01:00 wave so that says school-based mental health interventions there so that's the world I'm quite interested in in in understanding what happens in schools and so when we say kind of school based Med inventions like we've got to think like who gives the treatment is it from within the school from peers to as external from Mental Health Services for example we call cams and everything in between we think about to whom do we do something for the whole school do we do something for a classroom do we do something for targeted kids um what do
• 01:00 - 01:30 we do you know there a whole range of different things that are done and then there what I call these kind of really important prevailing concerns when we work in schools and kind of the whole mental health and well-being you know uh the issues of consent um issues of confidentiality the evidence base which is incredibly important then whose responsibility is it is education is it health is education is a health as education as health policy people can you tell us because no one can agree so then actually what happen happens is
• 01:30 - 02:00 decisions I think aren't taken and these kind of arrows just kind of highlight the areas that we've been working on to try and understand the unpick when you say school-based mental health basically it can mean anything in this kind of permutation combination of issues so what I'm going to do is talk to you about the oxville survey I'm going to then focus on two areas of our findings friendship and belonging because I feel that these are kind of our lowest hanging fruit which is why I was really excited to share my thoughts with you
• 02:00 - 02:30 about it if we have time and you said 35 minutes so I'm watching my clock carefully I'll stop if I have time I'll talk to you about networks of care um which is some of our analyses and bring in the belonging and and social media if I have time so what is the oxwell survey what do we ask how do we run it you know what's our thinking about it um so the oo survey is a survey that we've run we've just started our fifth wave this week so first 3,000 students
• 02:30 - 03:00 participate my first big school complaint just before coming here so that's um it's a big survey in 2023 they answered 200 to 350 questions so it's a massive investment of time from young people for which we're incredibly grateful so there's that discrepancy because if for example we ask have you self hared if they say yes then you might ask 10 more questions about self harm if you answer no you just go straight onto the next so people can finish it quickly or be asked more more
• 03:00 - 03:30 questions depending on their answers it asks about a whole range of well-being mental health factors risk and protective factors in 2023 about 40,000 students participated from 180 schools um primary secondary and further education colleges from years 5 to 13 which is 8y olds to 18 year olds um uh schools get individual reports they get access to data portal so we really really really want people to look at
• 03:30 - 04:00 data to base decisions in their schools based on the data of the kids in their schools so we try and make that as easy as possible we really don't want to identify kids we don't ask their names we don't have their date of birth we don't have their address we really just don't want to know them who they are and ever track what they've told us and we hope that enables them to be more accurate in their responses um we don't do it unless a local Authority um contributes money in order to run the survey in
• 04:00 - 04:30 their area and that's all around implementation signs so I found that local Authority might say yeah absolutely do the survey and never look at the results and although we're looking at the results and a big group of researchers are looking at it I'm really not interested if local authorities aren't going to implement change as a results so unfortunately I find the only currency is money so if they pay in then I can have that discussion already who's going to look at the results what are you going to do with it what do you want us to ask so we
• 04:30 - 05:00 kind of are much more able to bring about change and we've also been working in non-mainstream settings so we started in 2019 it's what we call a repeated cross-sectional survey about 5,000 just over 4,000 2019 we got a CO wave in 2020 31,000 in 2021 42,000 in 2023 2025 we've changed it quite dramatically we've made it much much sh shter we're only working with
• 05:00 - 05:30 two local authorities we're trying to get as many schools in depth these local authorities are really working with us to gather data and to work to implement change so that's the the the numbers that I'm going to be presenting to you from 2023 about 17,000 Liverpool 8,000 Oxfordshire 12,000 13,000 in bushire so what we've got is an area Oxford that has high inequality Liverpool relatively High deprivation and L quite High kind
• 05:30 - 06:00 of ethnic minority mix as well so I feel a very kind of Representative population of the UK uh about uh 50% of our students come from um uh schools that lie in postc called quintal one and two so the most deprived quintal as well so you can look on our website but that's just kind of giving a glance of kind of what we kind of do with the data and I won't talk too much about this kind of mental Health public mental health
• 06:00 - 06:30 schema that we try and work towards but kind of um I can talk more about it later if you want but basically I feel that understanding the influences of children we should think about um interpersonal influences institutional influences and Community influences and we've written about this and my argument is at the heart of those three life schools so why I'm really interested in that whole world of schools as kind of key in understanding the mental health
• 06:30 - 07:00 and well-being of our student population so what do we ask well we ask quite a lot so I'm not going to go into detail about that but we really ask you know everything that we think could contribute to well-being so around friendships around sleep around physical activity about diet also around mental illness so we have kind of the Arad which is a measure depression anxiety we ask about eating disorders we ask about social media Etc you know because we asked so many questions before we had an
• 07:00 - 07:30 opportunity to really investigate a whole range of areas that are important and also because we ask it in this repeated way we can be quite responsive so you can ask things what's happening with X what's happening with Y what who's looking at this social media platform for example that actually the questions two years ago are not really relevant to today's young people because everything changes so rapidly so we want to kind of be able to be flexible as well and we run the survey well as I
• 07:30 - 08:00 said the local school the local authorities help us engage the schools and we do a whole load of um things but we give really early reports to schools um looked a bit like that school gets reports like that don't to deal with it in detail but this is why the schools come back because they get information that's also useful to them um and we have a website so you know as much as we can we put it all on there so as I said respon count issues we're able to look for example in Co times you know
• 08:00 - 08:30 we published probably one of our highest impact papers was a paper called happier in lockdown where we were able to kind of in the first lockdown track you know but almost a third of young people said they were happier in lockdown so it's not uh denying the fact that they were a very very vulnerable group for whom their vulnerabilities did explode in the lockdowns but actually there was also a massive group for whom they were reporting improved well-being and that's an opportunity to understand and learn what the drivers of that might have been
• 08:30 - 09:00 last time we looked quite a lot at vaping because our local Authority Partners wanted us to look at that and then social media influences like constantly concerning changing confusing benefits and kind of risks as well so um I'll just give you kind of some like some some kind of ideas like so we asked for the first time in 23 uh do you think you're neurodiverse or we asked do you think you have um
• 09:00 - 09:30 dyspraxia dyslexia ADHD and or Autism brackets or on neurodiverse and some other way 20% um TI that box so in 2025 we are really going in a lot more depth about all of those areas um I won't kind of go into details but you know just kind of we asked about the cost of living crisis and eating problem so kind of 22% for kind of say that they were skipping meals at school due to shape
• 09:30 - 10:00 and weight concerns um 18% had said that they had um vomited um they had brought up food following a meal um we ask about do they feel safe you know what proportion saying they feel safe or very unsafe either at home 3% um at school and alsoo sure was about 12% of the total it was about 10% so quite a lot of feeling unsafe at school
• 10:00 - 10:30 that's just not okay really is it and then 8% are saying on the journey to and from school they're feeling unsafe so schools have looked at this data local authorities have looked at this data looked at bullying alongside that and some have said all actually like our bullying is happening on the way to school on the way from home from school so they're able to bring about new policies about Staffing the outside school areas after school to try and enable feelings of safety
• 10:30 - 11:00 um um so I'll just move on so I think the strengths of the study are it's Anonymous we can get data on quite sensitive issues because we don't ask them to identify themselves we can be a bit responsive we like to encourage inquiry we're getting kind of provision changing quite a lot because our local Authority partners are really looking at the data it's taken four waves to get them to look at the data most people are scared of data I get it but we're hoping it's it's really getting better now the
• 11:00 - 11:30 weaknesses are it's been very opportunistic like we just start we took a we took a legacy survey that had been done in blera 100,000 students had completed it over 10 years so we thought let's get that data but then it became impossible to get that data then we was we had a survey we hadn't developed so there are lots of kind of complexities of bringing the survey aligned with more validated measures funding well was always just opportunistic so we never really had a long-term Vision we were just kind of try what we could it's cross-sectional in in
• 11:30 - 12:00 nature so we can't make links we had planned for it to become longitudinal so that we could but we're so convinced that young people won't give us accurate responses on the issues that we're most interested in that we've decided not to pursue linkage we're sticking with the cross-sectional model all right and then just thinking about inquiry so we create a data platform so a school can go in and say I want to know what the boys in you R who say they're being bullied what
• 12:00 - 12:30 other factors are there and they can look at that schools get these reports that are kind of 60 pages long and they find it really kind of useful so and half of the schools then log into the data portal afterwards the Commissioners I look using it in really interesting ways and then we're able to encourage kind of Citywide things but that's not the point of the talk so I'll just move over that's the dashboard that the school could get okay and then Liverpool for example early on invited 150 kids who did the
• 12:30 - 13:00 survey so these are the early findings what do you think we should do with them so that's of our co-production and Liverpool's like used it extensively in public health and education in broader areas and in health provision as well so I feel that you have to have that in order to justify the massive investment of time and trust that kids put into it um and kids hear that it's being used and so I think they're happy to do it all right so now I'll get to what I promised to talk about which is some of our friendship
• 13:00 - 13:30 findings I'm drawing heavily on the work of Tanya manchand my defa student who is looking only at friendships in heril I think it's come from the fact we just don't understand what friendship is anymore like what is it like is it online is it in person like what like I I went out with my daughter a few years ago and I was like teenager and she went oh yeah lots of my friends are here I'm like well then why don't you say hello she I would never do that I'm like okay I don't understand that friends in my
• 13:30 - 14:00 day you say hello but you know basically all the school kids of Oxfordshire are friends with each other on social media so they're aware of each other they might never have spoken to each other but they you know so I'm like I don't understand what friendship is so we're really quite curious about that so so we ask uh quite a lot of questions about friendship um and I'll present some of her findings to you that's all right so we've done the analysis around well well beinging and friendship
• 14:00 - 14:30 quality for you so it comes as no surprise I think that well-being and friendship quality are associated so higher quality friendships indicate better well-being so what we have down here is friendship quality High intermediate low and what we have up there is well-being schools so you can see the high friendship to low friendship and well-being I suppose that comes as no great surprise but it's
• 14:30 - 15:00 a very clear Association then we asked according to gender now um what we're um really learning a lot about is the gender diverse population so um we've got the data from girls from boys and then GD is gender diverse and then we have this gnd D category which is gender nondisclosing because it's import important proportion of kids don't want to tell us um but I I
• 15:00 - 15:30 don't think we should ignore their findings so we think that it's really important to categorize them as gender nondisclosing they're falling much closer to gender diverse in all our measures than in any other group and so it's really important I think that we include them so it's about 3.5% of the sample of falling into gender diverse or gender nondisclosing from 2023 needless to say we're ask it much much better in
• 15:30 - 16:00 2025 we've gone through a long process with gender diverse young people advising us about how to ask this well so we looked here at we webs again so well-being measure um and gender so this is girls so this is boys gender diverse and gender non-disclosing so what you see here is that boys have the highest well-being of all levels of
• 16:00 - 16:30 friendship quality um but they have the greatest drop when they have low quality friends so this is the kind of boys sorry you can't see that sorry this is French equality key part of this the the slide so high is red intermediate is green and blue is low so that's a quality of friendship against well-being schools girls boys gender diverse so you see the boys well-being
• 16:30 - 17:00 schools on that second dot but if they feel that their friendship qualities are low that seems to have the greatest difference um in their well-being schools um and gender diverse adolescents have the lowest well-being schools overall what age is this I so this is predominantly the secondary school population which is ages 11 to 18 okay I think we've got a slide year
• 17:00 - 17:30 group T um so but it's not by gender but the data is I just want to say available to you all to look at so if anybody wants to look at it we've put the data on something called the something called the brain waves Hub which is part of the dementia platforms UK we just think most people don't want to go on a dementia platform to look at adolesent data but we've made it freely available so you just have to fill in an application form it comes to me I'm happy to Grant it I'm
• 17:30 - 18:00 really you know this data is there so any kind of additional analysis anybody wants to do you won't be able to identify the kids you we remove school and Regional ID on the dpuk platform but this is available for anyone to look at so please if you've got students that want to look at it if you want to look at it it's available to you so this is by year group friendship quality so you can see that the quality of friendships seems to go the um go
• 18:00 - 18:30 down um so looking at well-being and friendship quality you can see this kind of General um Trend that kind of the lower friendship quality overall have got lower well-being but also there's just this General Trend as you get older and age everything seems to get worse as you get older and age all the kind of mental illness indices also get worse as you get older um so years 12 and 13 have the highest depression anxiety schools as
• 18:30 - 19:00 well as the lowest well-being schools so fral quality seems to be protective where high quality fren Associated of better wellbeing for all year groups and then this is about neurod Divergence status so this a self-identified very very broad category of neurod Divergence as I said the question is do you think your disp dyslexic have ADHD or ASD um and then looking at the well-being and friendship so this here is yes I think I am NE
• 19:00 - 19:30 Divergent remember 20% of the samples said that no not sure prefer not to say interesting isn't it this prefer not to stay seems to get closer to you know we we want to write a whole thesis on prefer not to say what that means in surveys or leaving blank you know because they often just they can be just excluded but actually need to think about them more seriously so that shows kind of the association between friendship quality and well-being moderated by neurod
• 19:30 - 20:00 Divergent status as well and then like we're really kind of curious about this kind of online friendships um so we just ask a lot about online do you go M to online do you go M to in person when you're distressed do you prefer to speak to your online friends um iners friends so so so so we kind of
• 20:00 - 20:30 asked this down here this is the one well-being and then at the bottom is amount of online close friendships all their close friendships are online to none of their close friendships being online we don't quite understand the findings so you can look at it and intera it for yourself so this is according to Friendship quality I think we're concluding that if you've got a bit of both it's probably best but we don't quite understand the group for whom all their friendships are online and they have quite High quality in we
• 20:30 - 21:00 webs but you know this is where quantitative data really needs that mixed methods approach qualitative inquiry to ask so Tanya is now kind of interviewing um young people at school and asking a lot about these questions in more detail so we also asked about the function of friendship so you know so we adapt we took um five questions from from the 25th item McGill friendship
• 21:00 - 21:30 functions questionnaire um so this kind of looks at uh different functions of friendship and rates their quality and the the functions are around intimacy reliability reliable Alliance emotional security and help now we didn't we couldn't ask the 25 so we went to um our young people's Advisory Group and asked them to choose the five most Discerning questions about covering the different areas of friendship so we didn't choose which five to ask but the five that they
• 21:30 - 22:00 chose did Cover the different domains which was important to us so we asked you know are your friends people that I can tell private things to are they people that you would stay my friend even if other people criticize me would want to say my friend even if we didn't see each other for a few months uh make me feel better when I'm upset and help me when I need it so we're able now to look at a lot of these measures according to Friendship
• 22:00 - 22:30 function as well we're able to look at neur divergent status and where they rate their friendships in this regard we're able to look at it according to well-being status as well so um so again with the Fred of quality which I've already presented it's how well you get along with your friends and then this is the kind of inperson versus online support that we're trying to understand so when you OT the question we ask is when you are most distressed
• 22:30 - 23:00 and want to speak to a friend how is it important how important is it for you to meet them face to face in in person you know so we're just trying to understand so basically what I say to schools is our biggest system of mental health support in schools are friends right so let's understand how they get used why they get used for what problems they get used which group are most likely to use them um we also ask a lot about as I said said service provision
• 23:00 - 23:30 and in those questions we go you know have you gone to a friend large that they second to carers they second to Caris and in How likely you are for example after self harm 40% will go to a friend for help but less than half of them find that helpful so we're trying to just understand so is it online is it in person we because we don't understand the world you know it's constantly changing we just try to unpick it all so this is kind of a plot of well-being along the x axis and then you
• 23:30 - 24:00 know looking at like well-being according to um whether you're more like to prefer in-person friendships when distressed versus you know not so this is according to gender girls boys gender non-disclosing and gender diverse so these are boys down here girls up here and gender diverse and gender non disclosing in the middle so you can see here girls are most likely to Value inperson
• 24:00 - 24:30 friendships when they're more distressed and that's just looking at it kind of the odds of it just another way to present the last graph so looking at girls versus boys which is the second one um and this is about well-being increases so these are like looking at well-being the higher well-being you know where you fall in that um because we're getting to 5:30 I'm not going to go in detail in these last slides I'm just going to say we've got kind of thinking about friendship functions and
• 24:30 - 25:00 neurod Divergence data so just looking that it's very easy to see that there are differences according to what um individuals feel are the functions of friendship according to these differences so you know neurodivergent individuals report weaker friendships across all five functions of friendship compared to non- neurodivergent individuals the largest gaps are in kind of intimacy reliable Alliance and emotional support and those who preferred not to disclose their neurod
• 25:00 - 25:30 Divergent status reported the lowest schools especially in intimacy and emotional support so again back to the group that don't even in a survey where we're not trying to identify them the group that don't tell us their answers are and that so this is intimacy reliable Alliance emotional support the long-term reliable and helpfulness and then the non- neurod Divergent neurod Divergent not sure prefer not to say so the neurod diverent is this pink one
• 25:30 - 26:00 just looking at the different friendship functions and then looking at those friend functions by gender the girls are in the kind of ready pink color the boys in the blue sorry to be so predictable about the color choices um the gender diverse purple and the gender nondisclosing green so again kind of differences in how friendships are rated so girls consistently report the highest ratings across all friendship functions
• 26:00 - 26:30 gender diverse individuals the lowest ratings so I'll spend a few minutes talking about belonging if that's all right um as you can feel I can happily talk for hours but way so we ask a question about do you feel part of your school you know how much do you feel part of your school and it's been so interesting and so important um and the associations with wellbe is so kind of Stu that it's
• 26:30 - 27:00 really kind of propelled I feel really really useful discussions so for example the head teachers of oxer secondary schools at their conference made belonging the theme of it they invited me to come and talk and share the findings a real kind of shift in you know actually you know let's not focus on academic attainment let's the lows hang through this you get the belonging get the friendships right and then probably a lot of these other factors will become easier to achieve
• 27:00 - 27:30 so how much do you agree with the following statement I feel like I am part of my school um so those with higher well-being had a higher sense of belonging um and year group differences year 10 having the lowest sense of belonging year 10's a great year like they're so critical of everything you know every year 10 kid thinks their school deals really badly with bullying you know so I tell the schools don't worry like you have to compare yourself to all the other year 10 so something's going on in year 10
• 27:30 - 28:00 but you know that kind of either you've much more aware of Injustice and so you you notice it much more I don't know what's going on but it's quite interesting so this is across the year groups like how the change and odds of feeling a sense of belonging um so you we take year seven as the reference group and you see that kind of that sense of belonging definitely increases in the sixth form but gets quite low around year 10 um and then we're able to look at kind of school belonging according to
• 28:00 - 28:30 different ethnicities so the pink is the agree the blue is the disagree and here we've got kind of the Caucasian white population about 50% feel they belong to their school um well much lower proportion amongst the the population identify as black and kind of other so really important to think about you know what is that saying about our schools and because we've had 14 ,000 answer these questions we really can
• 28:30 - 29:00 look at these numbers in really interesting ways um so that's by this again and then friendships quality and school belonging so if you have high friendship quality intermediate friendship quality and low friendship quality and look how starkly you sense your belonging at school seems to um change and that's according to wellbeing and school belonging so we well beinging school there agreeing they belong here
• 29:00 - 29:30 disagreeing there and kind of that [Music] Association and belonging according to extra CC activity so look at this if you feel that your school offers extra curcular activities you've have much more you know much more likely to agree that you feel you belong in school um than those that don't so you know these are kind of I suppose what I think of as the low hanging fruit you
• 29:30 - 30:00 know this is actually very very simple to change you know this is something you can intervene in this isn't like changing family structure and poverty you know those are really difficult things for us as kind of researchers go okay improve kind of um you know uh income and you know this is actually something that you know schools can actually think about we looked at according to kind of school detention and belonging again you know if you've
• 30:00 - 30:30 kind of um been frequently getting frequent detentions you know you actually strongly you know you're much less likely to feel that you belong in your school um and what about gender identity and belonging so for the group that are extremely worried about their gender identity that's the group that agree they feel they belong in their school and that's group that feel they don't
• 30:30 - 31:00 belong so it's an interesting marker so I think I'll stop there should I stop there for discussion CU um rather than yeah if you want to W up um so I'll I think yeah why don't um so I think basically what we have is in there's a treatment called cognitive behavior therapy in um it's a kind of Main St
• 31:00 - 31:30 treatment for depression and anxiety and you have this thing called the hot cross bun so I'm just going to rush through my slides to see whether I've kept that hot there okay so you get this hot cross bun in um for example the treatment of depression right so you've got kind of how people think I [Music] am worthless when you're depressed you got how you feel I feel low I you got
• 31:30 - 32:00 your physical symptoms I just want to you know I feel really cold I feel slow I just therefore my actions are that I might be more likely to stay in my room and isolate myself because of all these kind of fors and we call this the hot cross button and you can work through it in treatment of anxiety you can work through it in the treatment of depression so to address it we could say oh you know okay let's just like talk
• 32:00 - 32:30 about your thoughts and challenge them or talk about your feelings and challenge them but we also find actually if you don't talk about your thoughts and you don't talk about your feelings but you just change the action of let's just get you out of your bedroom and do x y and Zed and this is what we call behavioral activation but actually you see a shift in thoughts and feelings without actually necessarily needing to talk about them and address them so my thinking is with belonging
• 32:30 - 33:00 and friendship could it be the same that actually there might be hundreds of drivers for why you struggle with friendships and why you don't feel you belong but if there are ways that the school can facilitate you feeling you belong better or facilitate friendships like we don't want obviously as schools go okay Jane you've got to be friends with Jack and that we've put you together and now you're going to be friends you have to have this you know
• 33:00 - 33:30 the concept of an authentic friendship rather than a determined friendship but there are things that schools can do to facilitate young people developing authentic friendships it's usually in the extracurricular space it's usually um uh and and actually teachers can do way more than anybody else to facilitate that and think about what can we do in our environment or what we do to enable young people to interact with others in a way that they're able to find out
• 33:30 - 34:00 whether they are authentically you know uh feeling kind of like they'd like to get to know each other and spend more time together or all those functions of friendship the same of belongings so in 2025 we're asking 20 different questions I'm really curious to see if it's a really stupid question the kids just don't answer it well but we list 20 different things that schools do to facilitate a sense of belonging assemblies um uh trips uh family days and we ask them which which can you pick
• 34:00 - 34:30 the three of these that make you feel a sense of belonging most with your school so we can then go back to schools and say that the young people in these year groups or with these issues these are the things that are going to help them so I feel that I'm really Keen to encourage a discussion around kind of things that we can change to enable belonging and friendship which I believe potentially could shift a feeling of well-being across the board and because they're very tractable so I do have a final slide about thank but this is not my work it's hundreds you know of
• 34:30 - 35:00 amazing people who work with me and especially young people and schools and teachers devote a lot of time to help us gather the data that is really what I'm presenting so thank you very [Applause] much for