A week on, I’m still feeling the energy generated by so many expert contributors at our first BrainWaves conference last Monday. Delegates from schools, universities, cohort studies and youth work came together to discuss the latest research in adolescent mental health. Topics included inequalities in mental health (including the effects of sex, ethnicity and neurodiversity), drivers of anxiety and self-harm, the effects of belonging, sport and social media, and how science informs education policy.
Across the day, three key themes emerged.
- There is a genuine diversity of experience of wellbeing across our population of young people
- The value of data, including the broad, deep dataset that BrainWaves provides
- The importance of organisational culture in young people’s experience
Diversity of experience
Different groups of young people have profoundly different experiences of mental wellbeing. We heard about the very different (and worse) mental health experiences of girls who have experienced sexual harassment or assault, the different (and better) experiences of British-Pakistani young people in Bradford compared to their white British peers, neuro-diverse pupils, and the 10-year growth in anxiety nationally compared to a 5-year improvement in wellbeing reported in the Manchester BeeWell study. Part of BrainWaves core mission is to map the experience of young people through data. The diversity of experience represented in these studies demonstrate the complexity of understanding the causes and consequences of both wellbeing and mental illness.
Value of a broad, deep dataset
The complexity of the causal relationships, encompassing both individual behavioural choices and a range of underpinning structural inequalities, requires complex models to unravel.
We therefore need to ask a broad range of questions to reflect an adequate range of different influences on mental wellbeing. That in turn demands that the questionnaire is as efficient as possible, which is why BrainWaves has invested analytical time into making the scales it uses as accurate and efficient as possible.
But above all, the complexity requires a large dataset. BrainWaves’ current data includes 24,000 unique participants, not all of whom are relevant for all questions. By the end of 2026 we aim to grow that number to 40,000, and to 100,000 by 2028.
Importance of organisational culture
The idea of ‘belonging’ as a key driver of wellbeing percolated through several different sessions at the conference. In the second plenary of the day, the benefit of sport for wellbeing was deconstructed: part of the benefit came from physical activity (ie from exercise rather than sport specifically), but just as significant was the sense of being part of something that the best sports activity brings. And not all sport brings the experiences that matter: sport can be stressful, pressurising and even alienating; but when sports activity generates belonging, support, shared goals, positive relationships and personal attainment it can have a powerful impact on wellbeing.
Exactly the same point about the nature of the school experience was at the heart of the discussion around belonging and attendance. As a BrainWaves youth ambassador explained, a sense of belonging is founded on repeated micro acts of kindness and support, that taken together say “you belong here”. Culture, it was suggested, is created more from these cumulative behaviours by adults in school than from vision statements and posters on walls.
It is no accident that these three themes also reflect BrainWaves core activities:
- Data to capture the lived experience of young people and make it available in a globally-accessible research resource.
- Wellbeing research to understand and improve population-level adolescent wellbeing in a digital world.
- Education resources for schools to build agency, resilience and belonging.
At the end of the day, Michael Thomas, Chief Scientific Adviser at the DfE, awarded the prize for the best poster at the conference to Reihaneh Farzinnia, a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester. Reihaneh’s poster reported on a fascinating attempt to harmonise findings across 6 different large datasets on mental health in young people. A fitting study to end the conference that reinforced the importance of collaboration across the sector to make use of varied, detailed evidence from multiple sites if we hope to capture the multiple stories of young peoples’ experiences of mental health and wellbeing.
Julian Turner, Director of Education | BrainWaves
