Listening to 170,000 young people – how the OxWell Student Survey is reshaping youth mental health support

One in seven secondary school students in England meets the threshold for clinical depression. A third have seen self-harm content online in the past month. Yet the people responsible for supporting those children – teachers, commissioners, NHS planners – have had little timely, local data to act on.

The OxWell Student Survey was designed to close that gap. Developed by the University of Oxford's Department of Psychiatry and supported by the NIHR ARC OxTV since 2019, OxWell asks young people aged 9–18 directly about their lives, wellbeing, and what help they want – then returns the answers to those who can act on them.

Our approach and partners

OxWell is a large-scale, anonymous, repeated school survey – now in its fifth wave. Young people help shape the questions, the language, and how findings are shared. In 2025, student advisors proposed a new question about wanting help to support a friend or family member. A third of respondents said they would have wanted that help – a finding now shaping conversations with service providers.

ARC OxTV has been OxWell's core funder, with additional support from local authorities and health partners including Oxfordshire County Council, Liverpool City Region, Buckinghamshire Council, NHS England, the Anna Freud Centre, Place2Be, and the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH).

What we found – and why it matters

1. Over 170,000 responses across five survey waves (2019–2025), making OxWell one of England's largest sources of school-based youth mental health data. The 2025 wave alone gathered responses from 35,000 students in 95 schools and colleges.
2. A new secure data platform – OxHub – returns findings directly to schools and partners. Over 120 users have logged in more than 650 times since launch. OxHub allows partners to filter data by year group, gender, or vulnerability indicators such as loneliness, enabling targeted rather than one-size-fits-all planning.
3. Local authorities are using OxWell data to drive spending decisions. Liverpool City Region funded new school-based mental health innovations directly from OxWell findings. Oxfordshire commissioned additional analysis on school belonging and attendance. Two local authorities hired dedicated research assistants to analyse OxWell data for their Transformation Board meetings.
4. Findings have reached national policy forums, including the Prime Minister's Round Table on Child and Adolescent Mental Health, the Times Education Commission, and consultations with NHS England, the Department for Education, and the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities.
5. Schools are changing practice based on their own data. Schools have used individualised reports to revise anti-bullying policies, redesign extracurricular programmes, and plan staff training on neurodiversity. In 2021, at least ten students sought help for maltreatment after completing the survey – the act of being asked prompted disclosure.

The research has generated over ten peer-reviewed publications with more than 200 citations.

What this means

OxWell demonstrates that a well-designed school survey can be far more than an academic exercise. When findings are returned quickly and accessibly, they become a tool for action – enabling schools to understand what their students are experiencing, and enabling commissioners to plan services based on evidence rather than assumption.

The 2025 data reveal that school trips are the single most powerful driver of school belonging, that a third of bullying happens during lessons, and that loneliness functions as a reliable early warning sign for a cluster of mental health difficulties. These are specific, actionable findings that can reshape how a school allocates its pastoral budget or how a local authority commissions support.

What needs to happen next

OxWell's current reach – 95 schools in 2025 – represents a fraction of England's school population. The survey format and OxHub platform are designed to scale, but expansion requires sustained funding and active commissioning.

Three things are needed. First, more local authorities and integrated care boards need to commission OxWell in their areas, treating it as infrastructure for evidence-based planning rather than a one-off research project. Second, schools need support to act on findings – data without capacity for response risks raising expectations without meeting them. Third, OxHub needs to link with other local data sources so commissioners can see the full picture of children's needs.

The children who completed the 2025 survey trusted that their answers would matter. Sustaining that trust means acting on what they said.