By: Lucy Kellaway / The Financial Times (original title:

)

Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

In less than two weeks, 250,000 18-year-olds in England will return to school for the last time to receive a piece of paper on which three letters of the alphabet will be printed.

These grades will sum up their academic achievements so far, influence the rest of their education – perhaps the rest of their lives.

Twenty-five of them are my students.

I don't know how they will feel that day, but I doubt it.

Since last September I have been doing my best to teach them about monopoly competition, the Laffer Curve (the relationship between tax rates and the amount of tax revenue collected by governments – vp) and the rest of A-level economics (standardized exams in secondary schools - vp).

But have I given them the support they need in a wider sense?

Across the country, these teenagers are perhaps the most vulnerable, most inadequately prepared and most disaffected group of Year 13 students ever to achieve A-level results.

They lost half their jobs in year 12 after being imprisoned in their own homes.

They have never taken public exams before, as they have not taken their GCSEs (general certificates of secondary education – vp).

Add to that the emotional fallout from Covid-19: it's not easy being a teenager at the best of times, but the pandemic was the worst - when they were locked away, away from friends and relationships and without any of the rituals of life that make them normal.

We all knew that those who were barely coping before the pandemic would emerge from it worse off than before.

What I didn't know was how widespread the disturbance would be and how long it would last.

Also, I had no idea how difficult this would make teaching.

"There is an epidemic of anxiety in children of all ages, all over the country.

It's even more pronounced than I expected," says Rachel de Souza, the Children's Commissioner for England who - on the effects of lockdown - last year surveyed more than half a million children.

The latest NHS (National Health Service - vp) figures for England show that the number of young people with a "possible mental disorder" has risen from one in nine before the pandemic to one in six today.

A record 420,000 children are being treated for mental health problems.

Between April and October last year, there was a 77 per cent increase in the number of children needing treatment for serious mental health crises - such as suicidal thoughts, eating disorders and self-harm.

I teach at a girls' school and it's the girls who seem to suffer the worst.

According to the School Youth Mental Health Coalition, nearly a quarter of young girls in England – by the age of 17 – have experienced a mental health disorder.

Almost a third of girls aged 16-18 have self-harmed.

The health system is not coping with the demands.

In some countries, schools report a waiting list of more than a year to be seen by CAMHS – Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services – for students with severe symptoms.

Some directors have been forced to hire their own advisers – but even if they can afford them, there aren't enough to help.

"When I started this job, I wasn't that worried that a child in this school might commit suicide," the head of security at a public school tells me.

"Now I think this can happen.

This role is difficult.

It's a very hot potato and I'm keeping it."

The first and most obvious sign that teenagers are not adjusting is that they are absent - they fail to come to school.

There are 25 girls in my year 13 class, but the biggest number that turned up for any class – all year – was 22. Sometimes the number went as low as 16.

Poor school attendance has been the most serious and enduring educational legacy of Covid;

it's been more than a year since the lockdown ended and there's no sign of it returning to pre-pandemic levels.

At my school, attendance is generally much better than most schools, partly because of the policy of calling home and – in extreme cases – sending minibuses to get students out of bed.

But across England, figures for secondary schools have fallen from around 95 per cent in 2019 to less than 90 per cent today.

Participation worsens as students get older and, although there are no official figures for year 13, officials say the figure could be as low as 80 percent.

The government is scratching its head to find out what can be done at the national level, but so far nothing has been done.

During the isolation, the students were told that their health is more important than their education.

Now he has to find a way to make a reverse discovery and tell them that, after all, real education is important.

School is a habit.

And, for the children who need school the most, this habit is broken.

I had a conversation with a girl in my tutoring group about her poor attendance record.

"Why do we have to come to school when we have taught ourselves during isolation?", she asked, quite reasonably.

When classes start, the students of the last two years are often absent;

they tell me they can't focus on work – because of their poor mental health.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about it.

On the one hand, the stigma surrounding mental health has been lifted and there is no longer so much shame in discussing it.

But on the other hand, the pandemic has greatly exacerbated what was already a rising tide of mental distress among children – fueled in part by the devastating effect of being online all day and half the night.

"Unrestricted use of social media has been like handing a nine-year-old a bottle of vodka and saying, 'Good luck,'" says Juliette Oakshett, a mental health consultant at a prominent London private school.

Whatever the reasons, most teachers are poorly trained to deal with anxiety on this scale – there is almost nothing in teacher training that covers it.

The only thing I know is that if an Ashiqar student is not eating or is harming herself, then I should report her to the school immediately.

What's harder is knowing how to deal with the rest—the much larger group of teenagers who aren't alarming enough to report, but who seem subdued or anxious and who are seen as not make the best of school life.

According to a study reported by the BMJ (British Medical Journal), 29 percent of schoolchildren in the United Kingdom are "sucked up," and one remedy that seems to work well with adults—training mindfulness to live in the moment—is proving to it doesn't help at all in school circumstances.

My instinctive approach, with my students, is to keep going regardless of the circumstances.

One day I heard myself telling the class that anxiety is useful and necessary and that, in any case, exams are meant to make them anxious.

As I spoke, a chill ran through the classroom.

I felt like that most unattractive thing: a mental health denier.

Students often tell me that the amount of work I do is harmful to their mental health.

When I call home to explain that six hours of work a week on a subject is considered necessary for students to succeed at A-level, I often hear parents stand firm with their children.

The girl is in distress, they say.

I have to break his neck.

After every conversation like this, I wonder: aren't the parents right?

This change in parental attitudes seems to be a general feature of the post-Covid world – we can no longer rely on them to reinforce the message that school work is not optional.

The vice-principal of a school in the north of England told me: “We used to have the parents on our side.

But now they just say: 'She has gone through a lot of difficulties'".

It's hard not to sympathize – their children have been through a lot.

But is that the reason they miss school and don't do their homework?

It's not just the amount of work I do that makes students anxious.

It's the lessons themselves.

Last year, I taught public speaking to seventh graders, insisting that each child take a turn toward the front, introducing themselves to the class.

One student found this so stressful that she started crying.

Again I asked myself: should I have taken it out?

There is a student-led movement in the US to outlaw mandatory classroom presentations, as they discriminate against students with anxiety.

I'm pretty sure this is a disastrous path to follow.

But even the concern of an 11-year-old does not feel appropriate.

I made an appointment to see the head of defense at my school to discuss what I should do.

She started telling me about trauma-informed teaching practice, where you treat every child as if they've been traumatized.

This makes a lot of sense in my school where – during the pandemic – 50 out of 1500 children lost a close family member.

But I want to ask if this means a general lowering of expectations and if that might not be a good thing.

Our conversation was not long.

In just six minutes she was interrupted four times by phone calls about certain children.

The last call was about something serious enough that he had to hang up on me and go fix the problem.

Schools everywhere have analyzed the concerns of their students and are wondering what they should do.

Should they be hard or soft?

The school where I taught has a strong approach: no excuses, high expectations, and uniform demands for punctuality and homework so unforgiving that students have no choice but to comply.

My current school has a softer, more nuanced approach based on the well-being of particular students.

Which one is better?

And how would we know that?

It's difficult, says Katharine Vincent, director of Reconnect London - the organization set up to get the capital's school leaders talking to each other to help solve problems that affect them all.

"On the one hand, there is a need to prepare students for exams, while, on the other hand, we do not want to contribute to the existing mental health conditions.

It's not an easy balancing act, especially given how scarce school resources already are."

During one day at school, in my group I was teaching a lesson on PSHE (personal, social, health and economic education) about mental health.

This is something that all schools do and it serves an important purpose: it reduces the stigma of mental health and makes students who are not well feel less alone.

During the lesson, as the students one by one said that they have anxiety, I started to feel worried.

Breaking the taboo might be great, but all this self-diagnosis seems wrong to me.

I'm afraid the effect of my lesson is just adding to the information they've already gleaned from TikTok.

If you type "anxiety" into the platform, the first video that pops up shows an attractive teenage girl saying that nail biting and losing concentration are signs that you have anxiety.

More than nine million people have seen it.

"These are two issues that are terribly intertwined," says Peter Fonagy, chief executive of the Anna Freud Center, which provides treatment, training and research into child mental illness.

"There are students with mental illness who need help.

And, there are students who spend their time badly, do not adapt well and who have diagnosed themselves as not doing well".

Such self-diagnosis is making children more anxious and unhappy than they were before, he says.

Worse, avoiding the thing they are anxious about (school and exams) is the surest way to make the anxiety worse.

"We need to raise public awareness.

But this must be accompanied by understanding – which is currently very low.

What we have is not an epidemic of mental disorder."

He thinks that the biggest reason for the increase in the number of children with possible mental illness comes from the difference in interpretation.

Doctors ask the same questions, but patients who are more aware of mental health give different answers.

This has not been entirely positive.

"Anxiety, low mood and unhappiness are not diseases.

They are part of life.

Students have difficulties and need better ways to cope, but do not have a medical problem.

Those who are not well should go with counseling, but counseling will make others worse."

According to him, it is not my role as an educator to try to play psychiatrist to my students.

"This is my job," he says.

It's certainly not my job to be gentler with anxious students.

Instead, it is my role to operate in a predictable, well-directed classroom with clear boundaries.

I say that it is difficult to do this when the students are clearly in distress and tell me they are anxious.

What should I do – ignore them?

What if it turns out that they are seriously unwell and continue to self-harm?

He admits that it is not easy to be in this position.

"Teachers are criticized", he tells me.

"You're damned if you do and damned if you don't."

Despite this, I am relieved by our good conversation.

I decided to set clear boundaries, listen to my students, and support them as they try to cope.

However, at the same time I suspect that there is something else going on in these teenagers that is increasing their anxiety levels, which has nothing to do with either self-diagnosis or the coronavirus.

The UK's public examination system is designed to make them as anxious as possible.

I did my A-levels 45 years ago, when there was no pressure on me - from parents, school or friends bragging on social media.

But I still found it so stressful that for three decades after that I would regularly wake up at three in the morning drenched in sweat from a nightmare in which I had forgotten to review A-level physics, which in reality I didn't even have.

It is much worse for these teenagers, because the pressure is intensified: both schools and particular teachers are judged by the grades students receive.

As I chastise my A-level class for not working hard enough, am I just thinking about them or am I trying to look better as their results will be mine too?

If a teacher's job is to help students pass their exams and get the courage to face the difficult things life throws at them – in the latter, well, I've failed.

I was so busy telling them that exams mattered, to entice them to do some work, that I forgot to teach them something equally important: how to deal with disappointment.

On results day, I really hope my students don't need this life skill too much.

/Telegraph/