A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
The number of young people in the UK who say they do not believe that life is worth living has doubled in the last decade, amid a sense of overwhelming pressure from social media which is driving feelings of inadequacy, new research suggests. In 2009, only 9% of 16-25-year-olds disagreed with the statement that “life [...]
Fake Instagram accounts, often referred to as “finstas” or “spam accounts”, have become the norm for many teens – but their reasoning for creating these is not as sinister as you think. I’ve spoken with 50 Australian families – including 118 children aged 1-18 – about technology use, and am currently conducting a follow-up qualitative [...]
Nearly a third of teenage girls have been sexually harassed online by children their own age, a study from charity Childnet suggests. Some 31% of girls aged 13-17 have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention, compared with 11% of boys. One in 10 of the 1,559 teens interviewed reported receiving threats of sexual violence, including [...]
In October 2010, Tom Rogers, a head of history and acclaimed Tes columnist, travelled down to Cardiff to hear a speech by the then Welsh education secretary Leighton Andrews. "I was sat at a table with a number of my colleagues who’d made the trip. I can’t remember a thing that Leighton said in a [...]
When you put a load on a piece of metal you stress it. That’s what the engineers call it. Stress. There’s actually a profession that deals only with understanding how much of a load any material can take. They’re called stress engineers. And these folks know everything about what happens when you exert a lot [...]
A rigid construct of how “real” men are supposed to behave leaves many feeling trapped, new research we carried out suggests. While most support gender equality, the young men in the UK, US and Mexico reported feeling pushed to live in the “man box”. They feel pressure to act tough, hide weakness and “look good”. [...]
The fundamental role of a teacher is not to deliver information but to make kids feel like they are important, and have an adult who will never give up on them. When my first child was born, I didn’t realise I was signing up for Mission Impossible. Even as my daughter grew into a toddler [...]
Pixabay Images There's a dirty little secret about the year 12 exams, a secret only those who've lived through them know. It goes something like this: they don't define you, and they certainly don't define the life that's waiting for you afterwards. The subtle culture pressures that exists around this time not only [...]
In last week’s newsletter I wrote about the sense of relief that students feel upon the completion of their studies and how the media exacerbates this by reporting on the HSC every day. You can set your watch by it can’t you? Seriously. Well, twenty-four hours before NSW student sat for their first [...]
