


“On average they only practised once over 10 weeks of the course. “They also show that the idea of mindfulness doesn’t help – it’s the practice that matters.” Those students that did engage improved, he said, but most did not. Prof Mark Williams, the found director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and co-investigator at the University of Oxford, said the findings confirmed the huge burden of mental health challenges that young people face, and the urgent need to find a way to help. The study, from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter, King’s College London, University College London and Pennsylvania State in the US, was published in the Evidence-Based Mental Health journal. While evidence for the effectiveness of this approach among pupils was “weak”, researchers found it had a positive impact on the teachers involved, reducing burn-out, and also on the general school climate or culture, though these positive effects were relatively short-lived.
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It typically involved teachers learning mindfulness themselves, followed by training in how to deliver it to their students in 10 lessons of 30-50 minutes. The research was based on a cluster of five studies, carried out over eight years by about 100 researchers working with 28,000 teenagers and 650 teachers in 100 schools. While it has been found to help with the symptoms of depression and anxiety in some studies, researchers from the My Resilience in Adolescence (Myriad) trial found the broad school-based mindfulness offer was no more effective than what schools were already doing to support student mental health with social-emotional learning. Mindfulness has become a popular meditation technique aimed at focusing the mind on the present moment, and involves learning how to pay attention and manage feelings and behaviour, to improve resilience in the face of external stressors.
