How young people feel about their school plays a crucial role in their development.
How young people feel about their school plays a crucial role in their development.
Any government needs a strategy – or at least its minions need to know what its aspirations are if they are to have a show at guessing how to make them happen. In 2016, the policy machine produced the
New Zealand Health Strategy: Future Direction. Often, the release of yet another strategy is met with groans or indifference, but this one has received attention further afield. No lesser health commentator than Atul Gawande, a surgeon and Harvard professor, tweeted, “New Zealand unveils its draft national health strategy – and it’s got a lot others around the world could learn from.”
Mental health is of most interest to me, of course, and although the strategy doesn’t have as much as I’d like, a fair number of references occur throughout.
As with any strategy, the rubber hits the road with the implementation. The success of this strategy may not be visible for quite a while, as the aspirations it outlines are turned into reality by frontline health workers. As a strategy document, this one is a little light on that detail, but it has a few examples. One that caught my eye was the Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project, a suite of initiatives at community and school level that aims to better the mental health of those negotiating the turbulence of ages 12 to 19.
This is the focus of our Youth Well-being Study team’s work, which has been supported by the Health Research Council since 2011. Late last year, our team went to the Police College to talk to Police Youth Aid frontliners about adolescent development. It reinforced for me the role that family and early family experiences play in setting the scene for a positive, or otherwise, transition to adolescence and adulthood.
This is common sense, so it should come as no surprise. And family was identified as an important factor in youth mental health in the Social Policy Evaluation and Research Unit’s research review, completed as part of the Youth Mental Health Project. Family-related vulnerabilities include childhood maltreatment; family mental illness, conflict or dysfunction; controlling or neglectful parenting; poverty and social disadvantage; being witness to violence; and changes in family dynamics that may include loss of
parental jobs or moving around.
Schools are another important factor, not only in what they objectively offer, but also in what they represent to young people. In our Youth Well-being Study research in schools, we find that having a guidance counsellor students feel they can talk to is important for such things as managing suicidal thoughts and concerns, but having a teacher they can talk to or feeling as if school is an important part of who they are is an even more important buffer against mental health problems and in promoting positive well-being – about 10 times more significant.
International research shows that the extent of identification with one’s school is a much better predictor of academic outcomes than traditional indicators, such as family income and ethnicity, that are routinely collected and analysed.
Again, this shouldn’t be a surprise. We know social networks, identification and such like are important for both mental and physical well-being. Carnegie Mellon researchers, for example, have found people with an active social network are half as likely to contract the common cold as people without. Crazy but true.