Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
There is a crisis in young people’s health, particularly in terms of mental health and obesity. Schools are not the only influence on young people’s health, but they are important and their influence is open to modification. Interventions to transform how schools are organised offer a feasible, acceptable and effective approach to promoting young people’s health. Such interventions can be tailored to local needs and contexts, and they have proven effective across different countries. Education policy should be reoriented to support such change – for example, by broadening what is learnt and by improving pedagogy.
A more supportive education policy context would help achieve more dramatic improvements in young people’s health. Schools should be encouraged and enabled to focus much more on building belonging and community – for example, through policy placing more emphasis on sports, arts and citizenship. School curricula should be broadened to include vocational learning and meet the needs of all, not just the most academic, students. Pedagogy needs to be improved by basing this on evidence from randomised controlled trials. The recruitment, retention and continuing professional development of classroom teachers need to be improved – for example, via better salaries and ongoing training on evidence-based pedagogy.
Increasingly, health interventions are delivered in schools or outside of school for school students, including health education, cognitive behavioural therapy, group counselling and mindfulness initiatives. These can be of variable use, with some being effective but others ineffective or even harmful. As an example, the Young People’s Development Programme actually increased rates of teenage pregnancy. Even when school-based health interventions are effective, schools may lack the motivation, time, capacity or resources to deliver them with the fidelity needed to ensure effectiveness. While there is a role for some school health interventions, they are not a panacea and do not remove, but merely compensate for, the toxic mechanisms described in earlier chapters.
Learning Together was strongly informed by previous studies conducted in the US and Australia. An array of school transformation interventions have been evaluated across the world, spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. These have achieved student benefits in the domains of violence, substance use, mental health, physical activity, sexual health and various educational measures. They support the findings from Learning Together that changes to how schools are run can improve mental health as well as reduce violence and substance use. A systematic review of the effects of school-based interventions that promote student commitment to school found that these reduced both violence and substance use in the short and the long term.
Secondary schools can damage the health of young people and the adults they become. This can occur via ‘toxic mechanisms’ involving educational disengagement, lack of a sense of school belonging, and fear and anxiety. These mechanisms can harm young people’s mental health as well as via increasing their risk behaviours, such as substance use and violence. Secondary schooling can be modified to avoid this damage and benefit young people’s health and learning.
Schools can be transformed to disrupt the toxic mechanisms of educational disengagement, lack of school belonging, and fear and anxiety in order to promote young people’s health. The theory of human functioning and school organisation offers the most detailed and comprehensive theory of how schools can promote student health. The Learning Together intervention was informed by this theory. This intervention, which involved student involvement in decision-making, restorative practice and social and emotional learning, benefited students in terms of reduced bulling, reduced substance use, improved mental health and improved educational attainment. The intervention produced these benefits via mechanisms involving building sense of school belonging and curtailing conflict.
Young people’s mental health is in crisis, with many – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds – struggling academically and with the later transition to employment. Feeling excluded, many young people turn to harmful behaviours, such as vaping and alcohol use, for escape and a sense of belonging.
Schools are increasingly expected to address these issues but often lack the time and expertise to do so effectively. Based on the author’s research, including the successful ‘Learning Together’ trial – an innovative programme that improved mental health, reduced bullying and raised academic achievement – this book provides a blueprint for a fundamental shift in how schools support young people.
Essential reading for teachers, public health workers and policy makers tackling the health and educational inequalities affecting young people today.
Schools can harm their students through mechanisms of educational disengagement, lack of a sense of belonging in a school community, and fear and anxiety. If schools do not engage students in learning or build their sense of belonging in school, students may seek ways to define their identity, status and transition to adulthood via other markers, which can include substance use, violence and other risk behaviours. If students feel unsafe at school or anxious about schoolwork, this can harm their mental health directly. It can encourage engagement in risk behaviours via, for example, self-medicating with substance use, or it can encourage protection-seeking by involvement with anti-school peer groups, facilitated by involvement in violence and substance use.
Education policy has pivoted in the last four decades to emphasise school autonomy and accountability. There is evidence that these developments have brought some benefits in terms of school management efficiency, consistency of standards and student attainment. However, it is also likely that some aspects of these changes have contributed to the toxic mechanisms of educational disengagement, lack of school belonging, and fear and anxiety. In particular, there has been a narrowing of the curriculum, reversion to regressive and ineffective pedagogies, erosion of collective experiences in schools, use of cruel and ineffective disciplinary methods and lack of support for students coping with the pressures of schoolwork. Thus, despite some positive developments, something is wrong with schools and school systems.
The current generation of young people is likely to be less mentally healthy than previous generations. There are also high rates of bullying, other violence and sexual risk, and previous declines in substance use are flattening out or reversing. In addition, young people in high-income countries tend to have poor diets and engage in insufficient physical activity, with increasing rates of obesity. And there is consistent evidence from different kinds of study that young people’s health and risk behaviours are influenced by the school they go to. These studies also provide a strong suggestion that these school effects occur through the three toxic mechanisms of disengagement, lack of belonging, and fear and anxiety.
