OxWell Student Survey

The OxWell Student Survey is an online school-based study that directly asks students about their mental health, wellbeing and school experience. Our aim is to learn from school-aged children and adolescents aged 9-18 years about what they need, which factors influence their wellbeing, and how they would like to access support if they have mental health difficulties. Since 2019, we have collected over 100,000 responses, providing us with unique and current insights into the lives of today's young people.We are so grateful to the students who take part and the schools and local authorities who have partnered with us. The fifth wave of this survey will take place from February - March 2025.

Student feedback on the 2023 OxWell findings

OxWell STUDENT Survey - 2025

We are currently preparing for the fifth wave of the survey, to take place in February to March 2025. For more information, please see OxWell website.

Summary Of OxWell 2023 (Ethical Approval Reference: R62366/RE0014)

The 2023 wave of OxWell survey (Feb-March 2023) had over 40,000 students participate from 185 schools and Further Education Colleges in 6 local authority areas. Over 200 questions were asked, providing us with invaluable information. We are incredibly grateful to all the young people who took part in the survey and for the continued partnership of our schools and local authority partners, who invest considerable time and effort into the study. We also designed a modified version of the survey in 2024 to ensure that non-mainstream schools could also take part, and we collected data from >200 students.

Those interested can learn about our early findings in this early video for students and the OxWell website has more information about our different outputs and resources.

These findings are helping us better understand what we can do in schools and with health services to better support all young people. We have devoted ourselves to sharing these findings with those who can make a real difference in young people's mental health and well-being. For example:

Sharing with schools

Every school that participates in the OxWell Student Survey received non-identifiable school-level results to help them better understand their student body. In addition, we hosted the National OxWell 2023 Insights Webinar on 6th July 2023 (which can be viewed here).

Sharing with services

We have shared our findings at meetings with central government, NHS England, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and mental health commissioners across the country.

Sharing with other researchers

We have a team of nearly 50 researchers across 15 universities looking at OxWell data. We have published 16 papers on our findings and presented at thirty academic conferences. Some key areas of interest for our team include

Mental health services and support
Self-harm and mental illness
School culture and environment
Friendships and interpersonal relationships
Gaming and social media
Sleep and physical activity

We also encourage any interested researcher to apply to access the data (more information below).

Sharing with the public

OxWell findings have had substantial media coverage on a national and international stage, with over >250 media outlets having reported on our research. We have also shared findings through podcasts hosted by the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health and others, which are all freely-available for anyone to listen to.

PREVIOUS INFORMATION FOR PARTICIPANTS AND PARENTS

For parents and participants 16 years of age and older, the 2023 Parent Information Sheet can be found here, and some frequently asked questions can be found here. Parents of pupils under 16 years of age are sent the information sheet and provided with instructions on how to opt-out by contacting the school directly.

Ethical Approval

The OxWell Student Survey (2023) has been approved by the University of Oxford Research Ethics Committee (Reference: R62366/RE0014).

INFORMATION FOR RESEARCHERS

The study protocol has been published in BMJ Open. Further information about the research programme, publications, academic collaborators and previous OxWell survey questions (variable guide) asked can be found on the OSF platform.

We are always interested in hearing from researchers who wish to use the OxWell data (free of charge). We encourage you to either contact researchers in the team directly, or through the team email (oxwell@psych.ox.ac.uk). Please look at the OSF pre-registrations directory to learn more about ongoing analyses. Requests to access previous data via the BrainWaves Hub can now be made via this form.

Funding Information

This project has received funding and support from the Oxford and Thames Valley NIHR Applied Research Collaboration and the Westminster Foundation. Participating local authorities and clinical commissioning partners contribute to the running costs of the survey. Previous surveys have received funding from Oxford Health NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, and the MRC Mental Health Data Pathfinder (Oxford).