England's Mental Health Baseline: Happy Lives, Strained Minds

England has just published its richest snapshot yet of life at twelve and thirteen, and the picture it paints is deliberately two-sided. The first findings from Growing Up in the 2020s, a Department for Education programme tracking nearly 8,000 pupils through secondary school and into early adulthood, establish a new mental health baseline for England's young teenagers: one in four met the criteria for a probable mental health disorder. Yet in the same survey, 94% of the young people said they felt neutral or happy about their life overall, and 98% said the same about their family relationships.

The project is led by the children's mental health charity Anna Freud, commissioned by the education department and run with University College London's Centre for Longitudinal Studies and the research firm Ipsos. The first wave draws on 7,811 young people in state secondary schools across England, alongside information from parents, teachers, cognitive assessments and official attendance records, according to the published findings. The cohort was first interviewed in 2025 and will be followed up in school years 9, 11 and 12, making this wave the mental health baseline against which the next five years will be measured.

What the baseline actually shows

The mental-health headline sits alongside striking figures on everyday school life. About one in five of the pupils met England's threshold for persistent absence, defined as missing at least a tenth of possible school sessions, while more than a third said they did not feel a sense of belonging at school. Belonging carries weight beyond the classroom: it has been described as teenagers' strongest shield against loneliness. Only 17% hit the recommended 60 minutes of physical activity a day. Against that, nine in ten reported at least eight hours of sleep on a typical weekday, 95% felt neutral or happy about their friendships, and 71% agreed they keep trying when they find something difficult, a measure the researchers treat as resilience.

Bullying emerged as another pressure point. Among pupils who said they had been bullied, fewer than a third were confident that school staff were even aware of it, reported by Tes, with one in three saying staff did not know and the rest unsure. Young people receiving special educational needs provision faced the sharpest end: 11% reported physical bullying daily or weekly, compared with 4% of their peers.

The inequalities were already there

Perhaps the most politically charged finding is how early the gaps open. Girls were more likely than boys to meet the screening threshold, 28% against 23%, but the widest divide ran along family income. Among pupils eligible for free school meals, 36% met the threshold, compared with 20% of those not eligible. The attendance gap was starker still: 34% of those pupils were missing a tenth or more of sessions in autumn 2024, against 13% of their classmates, according to regional analysis of the findings.

The same pattern ran through belonging, bullying and enrichment activities. Pupils with special educational needs provision and those on free school meals were less likely to feel at home at school, took part in fewer after-school activities, and reported poorer physical health, the researchers said. In the North East, an estimated 30% of pupils met the screening threshold, against the national average, and just 14% said they read for enjoyment most days, compared with 22% nationally and 30% in London.

Study director Professor Jess Deighton called the findings "incredibly nuanced," noting that inequalities linked to special educational needs, sex, ethnicity, attainment and family income are, in her words, "well established by the start of secondary school," in the study team's announcement. The disparities, she said, do not just touch pockets of a child's life but span home, school and the wider world.

Why this baseline matters

This is the first study in recent years to give England robust prevalence data for this specific age band, and it lands in a bleak context. An NHS England survey from 2023 found 22.6% of 11- to 16-year-olds had a probable mental health condition, up from 12.1% in 2017. Across the Atlantic, one in six US teenagers is living with serious anxiety, with girls most affected. The new research suggests the problem is already entrenched by the second year of secondary school, not something that arrives later in adolescence.

Education minister Paul Waugh called the study the clearest picture yet of life for young teenagers and said the government would expand Mental Health Support Teams and push through special educational needs reforms so pupils can get expert help before problems escalate. The department wants schools to help pupils build friendships, boost confidence, reduce harmful screen use and support good mental health, in a statement.

The project sits within the education department's outcome-pathway series, alongside Children of the 2020s, which follows under-fives, and Five to Twelve, which tracks primary-school children. For the cohort itself, the next check-ins will trace how mental health, attendance and belonging evolve through the GCSE years and into post-16 destinations. As Dilly, a 17-year-old on the study's youth advisory group, put it, Year 8 is the year when "your life grows and changes a lot," which is exactly why researchers chose it as the starting line.

The counterintuitive core of the report is worth sitting with: the same generation reporting record levels of distress also reports strikingly high contentment, with family, friendships and sleep mostly intact. That tension is the point of a mental health baseline. Five years from now, when the same teenagers are sitting their GCSEs and choosing what comes next, researchers will be able to say not just how they feel, but when it changed, and what, if anything, helped.