Young adults and teenagers who went to state schools in England are as happy with their lives as their peers at private schools, according to a new study by researchers at University College London.
The research found few differences in mental health or life satisfaction between the two groups, which surprised the study’s authors because of the substantial advantages in spending on wellbeing and support enjoyed by those at private schools.
Dr Morag Henderson, of UCL’s social research institute, the paper’s lead author, said: “Although school resource is greater in private schools, the academic stress students face might be too and so we see each force cancelling the other out.”
The study – published in the Cambridge Journal of Education on Thursday – is based on responses from a national sample of more than 15,000 people born in 1989 to 1990 who attended school in England, and were surveyed as teenagers and later in their 20s.
“While these methods do not prove causality, the absence of significant positive effects implies that there is no evidence that parents who decided to pay for private schooling were gaining mental health and life satisfaction advantages for their children,” the authors stated.
The research measured participants’ mental health by asking questions such as: “Have you been able to concentrate on what you are doing?” and “Have you lost sleep over worry?” It found little difference in responses between the two groups before and after adjusting for factors such as social background and educational achievement.
Those who attended fee-paying independent schools did report higher levels of life satisfaction in their 20s. But after responses were adjusted to exclude the effects of advantages such as higher income, house ownership and better exam results, the researchers again found no substantial differences in satisfaction levels.
Girls at private schools did report better states of mental health at the age of 16 than their peers at state schools but the same gap did not appear at the age of 14 or 15.
The study concluded that “there is no additional advantage of private schooling with respect to mental health and life satisfaction” for the cohort it studied. But it cautioned that private schools have further increased their spending on wellbeing and pastoral support in the years since the sample group attended school.
Dr Henderson said it was possible that the increased pastoral support “was just starting to make a difference” for private school pupils, who she thought might have received more support during the Covid lockdowns.
“This is speculation but it might be that we see state school students fare worse in terms of mental health compared to private school students, post-lockdown. This question is ripe for future analyses,” Dr Henderson said.
Earlier research among those born in 1970 found that attending a UK private school was associated with “heightened psychological distress” among women. But since the 1980s private schools have greatly increased their spending on supporting pupils.