Our Research Partners
Better adolescent mental health
We are deeply grateful to our current BrainWaves Research Partners, located across the country, who play a vital role in advancing evidence-informed approaches to student mental health and wellbeing.
Together, these schools and colleges form a growing national research network.
Through active participation and commitment, our Research Partners enable the development, testing, and refinement of robust, evidence-informed approaches to student mental health and wellbeing. Their partnership ensures that our research is grounded in authentic educational contexts and contributes to meaningful, scalable improvements across the education sector.
The map below shows the distribution of our Research Partner schools, with yellow showing state schools, green showing sixth form colleges, and purple showing independent schools.
What our research is already telling us
Insights from our previous cohorts are already shaping stronger wellbeing provision for young people and informing the design of our curriculum and support resources.
Key findings from 2024-2025 include:
- Gender differences in wellbeing: Girls reported higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms, alongside lower resilience and perceived ability to manage stress, compared with boys.
- Sleep as a critical factor: Only 44% of girls and 58% of boys reported getting enough sleep to concentrate during the school day.
- The importance of trusted adults: Just 55% of young people said there is an adult at school they feel able to talk to about their problems.
These findings demonstrate the value of large-scale, school-based data in identifying priorities for intervention. They are already influencing how we design lessons, develop wellbeing resources and support schools to respond to student needs, because we believe evidence should drive action.
Become a BrianWaves Research Partner
BrainWaves is a charity, so becoming a Research Partner is free for schools and colleges. If you’d like to find out more about becoming a BrainWaves Research Partner, please click below to register your interest.