Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No161

Voltaire, author of Treatise on Tolerance (1763)

Has the world turned on its head?

I ask this because there are so many words that are used today by ‘right thinking’ people that end up meaning the very opposite.

Such is the case with the word tolerance. I’ve mentioned this before, i.e. that those who emote about how tolerant they are strangely appear to be the most intolerant of people – ‘I’ll tolerate anything. EXCEPT YOUR HATE!’, they scream.

It comes as no surprise then to find out that around a fifth of children and young people surveyed say that they refrain from sharing their political opinions due to fear of being criticised. Worse still, a quarter said they had been asked to stop sharing their views at school.

There are intolerant people on all sides of politics, but I’m guessing that most of this intolerance is coming from people who define themselves as progressive, and of course, tolerant.

An example of this was shared by a young man attending a further education college who explained to me that after the recent election, both of his teachers came into class ‘devastated’ by the supposedly horrifying rise of Reform. It didn’t even occur to them, he noted, that some of the students in the class may have actually voted for these devils!

You don’t have to be a Reform supporter to recognise that something fundamental has changed here.

When I was at school and then college, you may have had an idea about the politics of your teachers, but sharing your political opinions in class was simply seen as unprofessional. Today, it’s like the world has turned on its head, and once again the ‘tolerant’ teachers appear to lack the comprehension or ability to behave as adults who understand their role and the historical expectation of educational neutrality.

Another world-on-its-head thing is sex education. Once, sex education was seen as limited in terms of both the need for it and its scope, but now it has become increasingly vital, it seems, even for very young children. But it is worth bearing in mind that the intolerant people mentioned above are the same people who are seemingly so liberal and tolerant about sex and sex ed. Perhaps they are not all they appear to be?!

Here, for example, we find a planned Labour Party initiative for a ‘summer of sex’ so that kids as young as eight can be taught about sexual pleasure.

It’s seen as pretty uncool to not be relaxed about all things sex today, but you don’t need to be a so-called prude to think this is, at the very least, odd.

In the not-too-distant past, liberal educators who were ‘cool’ about sex tended to express this in terms of allowing kids their space to grow and to experiment and to experience what were called rites of passage. Adults would give moral guidance, but teenagers were expected to have some space to grow up.

Today, the seemingly ‘liberal’ approach to learning about sex – as with every aspect of life – is for self-appointed progressive educators to colonise it with their ideologically informed expertise, to take any guiding role away from parents, and indeed to take away from young people the freedom to navigate their personal lives responsibly in their own way.

Rather than thinking about this summer of sex as some kind of libertarian initiative, it would be more accurate to see this as yet another example of the ‘lanyard’ class intervening and attempting to manage your child’s ‘soul’.

Seen by some as a positive expression of an age of sexual freedom, these types of initiative are produced by individuals, including many professionals, who hate the idea that children, their parents and peer groups can develop their own world of intimacy without their intervention. Freedom for people to create their own culture away from the gaze of the ‘right thinking’ set, is the very last thing they want.

As I wrote in the handbook Teenage Sex: What should schools teach children?:

Through the establishment of relationship education in schools, an area of young people’s lives, which up until recently was left alone, has become both professionalised and problematised. And rather than allow young people to develop their own network of friends to discuss sex and relationships, an attempt is being made to break the ‘power’ of the peer group, and in its place establish a network of teachers, counsellors and health specialists. By replacing peers with professionals, the incredibly important framework that peer groups and friendships provide for young people’s development will potentially be undermined.

Finally, you may have seen the controversy about the recent Higher Maths paper that resulted in a petition with 14,000 signatures of complaint.

At a time when exams are coming to be seen as a traumatising exercise that some see as a form of child abuse, this reaction – and indeed this spontaneous level of complaint – seem, on the surface, to be concerning.

Interestingly, and impressively, some teachers, like Andrew Moulden (check out his website), have come out fighting and have defended the maths questions that some of the pupils found so difficult.

It appears that the wording of some of the questions threw some of those taking the exam. The terms used were, apparently, ‘unrecognisable’ and ‘weird’. But why is this?

SUE, while being big fans of exams and of a knowledge-based education, is also concerned about school education coming to be a relatively unthinking form of teaching to the test. To look into this a little further, I asked a maths teacher with an impressive knowledge of Higher Maths, and this is what she said:

I have no way of testing what follows, but I suspect that this is actually quite a wicked, multi-factorial problem, involving some combination of:

– ‘Higher Maths booklets’ that schools produce being too limited in their scope (lacking challenge).

– Students having weaker vocabulary and lower reading comprehension ability than used to be the case (it is worrying that so many of them were bamboozled by the combination of a standard adjective and a standard noun – ‘linear’ and ‘factor’).

– Lower concentration levels, higher distractibility (due to TikTok, gaming, etc).

– The growth of ‘maths video’ culture (passive rather than active study).

– Teachers, including those on social media, attempting to predict what will be on a paper (students therefore don’t study sufficiently broadly).

– Students looking at answers too quickly when working on maths questions, rather than struggling for some time and in the process developing true resilience (I see this on a daily basis; the capacity for original mathematical ‘creation’ seems to me notably lower than it used to be).

– Insufficiently challenging homework exercises and the growth of short-answer multiple choice homeworks on Google Classroom etc.

– Over-reliance on past papers and under-use of resources that vary in style (e.g. textbooks).

If even half of the above is to some degree valid, then it’s an extremely knotty problem, and one that would require substantial reworking of Scottish education, as it now is, to overcome.

As you can see, the problems we face in education in Scotland are substantial, but they are also resolvable and there are plenty of teachers out there who know what to do and I suspect many attempt to do the right thing even if this means going against the grain.

There is, however, another problem in schools and that is the rapid rise of mental health labels being given to children.

Below, Graeme Arnott has usefully taken a look at some of the most recent evidence about this problem, evidence that the Scottish government and education experts should take a long hard look at.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Graeme Arnott works as a vocational assessor with apprentice electricians. He’s currently reading lots of C. S. Lewis.

I’ve just read a review article, published in January 2026 in Nature Reviews Psychology, by Lucy Foulkes and colleagues at the University of Oxford and University of Toronto. The paper is the kind of work that makes you wish certain people in government had read it before they acted, rather than after. I am not a psychologist, but I know something about competence, and I recognise it – and its absence – when I see it. And the question I want to ask, having now read both the paper and the Scottish government’s Mental Health Strategy 2017–2027, is a simple one: where, on the Dunning–Kruger curve, does the strategy sit?

Foulkes’ paper is careful and measured. The authors are skilled academics who hedge, qualify, and call for more research. That’s what one expects from an academic paper. But the caution isn’t just for show and is itself part of their story. Indeed, by itself it’s a beautiful meta-strategy that not only underpins their argument but structurally supports it. The paper, in other words, would carry less weight if it were more confident in its findings.

Foulkes and colleagues review the evidence for the kind of mental health awareness campaigns that have proliferated across schools, universities, and workplaces over the past two decades. And, perhaps not unsurprisingly, they find a picture that is considerably more complicated than the campaigns themselves tend to, or would like to, acknowledge.

On the positive side, there is reasonable evidence that well-designed campaigns might reduce stigma, improve what researchers call ‘mental health literacy’, and increase help-seeking behaviour. Those would be real successes. The paper does not argue otherwise. But, the authors point out, not all outcomes have been tested for all campaigns.

However, and it’s a very considerable however, the evidence for harm is also real; and tragically, it’s not getting better. Several high-quality trials of universal school mental health interventions have found negative effects: an increase in internalising symptoms, meaning that pupils who received the intervention ended up reporting more anxiety, more low mood, than those who did not. One large trial, conducted across 153 schools with 12,166 student participants, found that a mental health awareness programme produced long-term negative effects measured 9 to 12 months after the intervention. These are not marginal findings from poorly designed studies. These are the findings that emerge precisely when the methodological quality is highest – findings which have ‘prompted concerns about the potential risk versus the benefits of interventions’.

The experimental evidence is perhaps even more interesting. Studies in which participants were exposed to mental health awareness content in controlled conditions found that such content can change how people understand and label their own experience but without changing the underlying symptoms.

Participants who were read psychoeducational material describing trauma in broad terms were more likely to describe watching a violent film clip as a trauma even though they significantly did not report greater distress. Similarly, individuals shown social media posts normalising anxiety became more likely to believe that they too might have an anxiety disorder and that mental health problems are more prevalent than they actually are. Hence, the central concern of this essay. Like the participants in the film clip study, despite their newfound beliefs, their self-reported anxiety did not in fact increase. What the awareness materials changed, in other words, was not the individual’s experience but their interpretation of their experience: the language that they used to make sense of themselves. Mental health interventions at their educational institution gave them a label; and in turn they internalised that label.

This is what the researchers call ‘concept creep’ – the semantic expansion of harm-related terms like trauma, anxiety, and disorder until they cover territory they were not designed to cover. It was an awareness of this ‘creep’ that, in part, brought about the defeat of Liam McArthur’s Assisted Suicide proposal. There is experimental evidence that as the concepts expand, they lose their value and people’s perception of harm becomes less serious. For example, I am nervous about whether this article is accepted and well received but it would be an exaggeration and inaccurate to say that I am anxious about it. But as clinical terms, like anxiety, become a social currency, those who most need the currency – people with genuine, severe mental illness – find it devalued. And it’s hardly surprising to learn that some of them feel angry about it.

One mechanism the paper explores is the nocebo effect: the phenomenon whereby telling people they might be at risk of experiencing negative symptoms can cause those symptoms to appear. It is the shadow of the placebo effect.

A meta-analysis of 73 studies found a moderate nocebo effect across conditions and treatments. In a separate meta-analysis, the participants given a trigger warning prior to reading negative content, of the type given to Aberdeen University’s students reading J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, were found to have more anticipatory anxiety than participants not given the warning. The paper suggests that mental health awareness campaigns may operate similarly, and that by encouraging people to pay close attention to their psychological state, to interpret ordinary emotions as potential disorder, they thereby produce the very symptoms the campaigns were designed to address. The authors are careful not to overstate this. But they note that the conditions for nocebo effects are precisely those that many awareness campaigns create: an invitation to identify with a list of symptoms, and the message that such symptoms are common, perhaps inevitable. Give them the label and they become that label.

For the sake of at least some brevity, I will draw attention to only one study, of more than 700,000 young people, which found that having a classmate diagnosed with a mental disorder in the ninth grade was associated with a higher risk of others in that class receiving a diagnosis later. Although the mechanisms for this outcome are unclear, the researchers suggest that something like social contagion is possible. Awareness campaigns delivered in educational settings may amplify rather than contain that process. The entire crux of the article, and this piece, rests on the uncertainty of that modal verb. Sometimes, on some occasions, it might be good not to talk.

Against this background, consider what the Scottish government’s Mental Health Strategy 2017–2027 requires of Scotland’s schools.

The strategy states:

Along with literacy and numeracy, health and wellbeing is one of the three core areas that are the responsibility of all staff in the school. All adults who work in Scotland’s schools have a responsibility to support and develop the mental, emotional, social and physical wellbeing of pupils, as part of what is referred to as ‘Responsibility of All’. [my emphases]

It’s worth pausing to let that opening sentence fully sink in. That framing positions mental and emotional wellbeing as a curricular responsibility on a par with reading, writing, and arithmetic. This does two things simultaneously. First, it elevates mental wellbeing to the centre, the core function, of what schools are for. And, second, it borrows the Curriculum for Excellence model of ‘Responsibility of All’ – something that was originally designed to ensure that all teachers reinforced literacy and numeracy within their own subjects – and applies it to mental health support.

But the analogy does not hold. Reinforcing literacy across subjects means asking a history teacher to insist on good written expression, or a science teacher to model careful reading of source material. These are things history and science teachers actually know how to do and know how to teach. What the strategy asks of them in relation to mental health is categorically different. It asks them to ‘support and develop the mental, emotional, social and physical wellbeing’ of pupils as a standing professional obligation. All adults who work in Scotland’s schools be they a janitor, a classroom assistant, or a supply teacher covering a period on a Friday. All of them, by this mandate, are now practitioners in the psychological development of children.

My own response if a student were to tell me that they were struggling would be to listen, to take it seriously, and to direct them to someone qualified to help. I am a BRC trained first aider, and I understand that role precisely: I stabilise, I do not treat, and I hand over to someone with the relevant expertise as quickly as possible. The whole logic of first aid depends on that boundary. The strategy’s aspiration that mental health training should become ‘as common as physical first aid’ actually uses the right analogy but then proceeds to ask something the first aid model explicitly forbids: ongoing, primary responsibility for the patient’s condition.

There is no hand-off built into the ‘Responsibility of All’ model. And there is, more troublingly, no apparent awareness that the intervention might not help – or worse, might actively harm. This is where the Dunning–Kruger analysis becomes most pointed. The strategy reads with the confidence of a document written at the low end of the curve: just enough knowledge to be dangerous; not enough to recognise the risks. It does not ask whether awareness campaigns might produce nocebo effects. It does not ask whether social contagion might amplify rather than contain distress. Nowhere in the document does it use the word iatrogenic – the medical term for harm caused by treatment itself – because it operates within a framework that has no slot for that possibility. While ministers congratulated themselves on ‘raising awareness’, robust trials were finding that universal school programmes actually increased internalising symptoms when measured months later. The very interventions sold as prevention may have, where it already existed, amplified distress. And where there was no mental health concern; it may well have caused it.

This outcome was not simply the result of naive optimism. This is an outcome of utopian thinking at its most fundamentalist. This is a closed system of reasoning from which negative outcomes have been (deliberately?) excluded in advance.

The logic runs like this.

Mental health problems cause suffering.

Awareness reduces suffering.

Therefore, more awareness causes less suffering.

Not only is the logic unshakeable, but each step sounds perfectly reasonable. But that chain of logic not once passes through the question of mechanism, or evidence, or the possibility that the intervention might produce the condition it is designed to prevent.

Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss could not update his belief that we live in the best of all possible worlds because his metaphysics guaranteed the conclusion before the evidence arrived. The Scottish government’s strategy has a similar structure. It is committed to the good outcome by the terms of its own framing. It produced an argument that was valid and assumed no one would question its truthfulness. A case of what Gawain Towler calls elsewhere, the choice of the gesture over the outcome. Yet another example of performative policy making that prioritises feeling caring over being effective.

The strategy was published in 2017. The Foulkes paper, summarising experimental evidence from the following years, finds that the evidence base remains thin, that most evaluation studies are of low quality, and that the high-quality trials are precisely the ones most likely to find negative effects.

I want to be careful here about precisely what this paper is saying. Christian Waugh, a professor who shared the Foulkes paper on LinkedIn shortly after its publication – and whose post Foulkes herself liked – made a point worth heeding. Waugh noted that bloggers were using the paper to suggest that mental health awareness is simply harming young people. Mental health awareness classes might harm the mental health of the participants, but it might not. Foulkes’ paper itself lays out a genuinely nuanced picture. The awareness movement has made real gains in reducing stigma and bringing previously unacknowledged suffering into view. The pendulum, Waugh observed, can swing too far either way. He is right. This piece is not an argument for silence about mental health. It is an argument for competence in how we speak about it.

The Scottish government’s current Mental Health Strategy expires next year. That moment represents a genuine opportunity to produce a strategy which would look very different from its predecessor in several specific ways. It would, first of all, be written with the appropriate humility about what is known, and what is not. It would commission independent evaluation before scaling any intervention. Access to those independent evaluations would be open and publicly available. The strategy would not wait 5 years to review itself but would be responsive as research emerges – service station stops, at regular intervals – where the question is asked honestly: is this working, or is it causing harm?

References

Foulkes L, Winterburn I, Sandra D, et al. The psychological consequences of mental health awareness efforts. Nat Rev Psychol. 5:173–184 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00532-7, https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-026-00532-7 [Accessed 4 May 2026.]

Scottish government. 2017. Mental Health Strategy 2017–2027. https://www.gov.scot/publications/mental-health-strategy-2017-2027/documents/ [Accessed 10 May 2026.]

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A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/BmV6E Joanna Williams, The London school where pupils are fighting back against striking teachers. 13/05/26

https://archive.ph/4lHEQ Janet Eastham, BBC News boss: I was driven out by trans activism. Fran Unsworth says she was bullied by gender ideologues employed by corporation. 16/05/26

https://archive.ph/2026.05.17-055720/https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/26111292.academics-criticise-edinburgh-university-bosses-transparency-row/ Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco , Academics criticise Edinburgh University bosses in ‘transparency’ row. 17/05/26

https://archive.is/2026.05.16-001758/https://unherd.com/2026/05/inside-the-capture-of-the-bbc/?edition=us Rob Burley, How transgenderism killed impartiality. 16/05/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/05/17/the-gross-hypocrisy-of-teen-social-media-bans/ Bella D’Abrera , The gross hypocrisy of teen social-media bans. The same politicians calling for more online regulation are also pushing explicit content in the classroom. 17/05/26

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/18/university-administrators-in-scotland-are-helping-to-spread-antisemitism-but-theyre-so-dumb-they-dont-even-know-theyre-doing-it/ Stuart Waiton, University Administrators in Scotland Are Helping to Spread Antisemitism but They’re So Dumb They Don’t Even Know They’re Doing It. 18/05/26

https://archive.ph/6mMAu Sanchez Manning, Mother sues all-girls school for ‘admitting transgender pupil’. Joanne Donoghue sent her three daughters to Beverley High School, which she had attended as a child, but learnt a biological boy had been admitted ‘secretly’. 15/05/26

https://archive.ph/z85QP Charles Hymas, Schoolchildren taught black people cannot be racist to white people. Pupils as young as seven told they have responsibility to be aware of ‘white privilege’. 17/05/26

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