We’ve been talking for half an hour about the pressure of exams before Ashraf reveals just how great a toll they took on him. “When I was doing my GCSEs I had panic attacks quite a lot because of stressing over my results,” he says. “I would just freeze up. I wouldn’t be able to breathe, I’d get a headache, I’d occasionally get nosebleeds.”
He only told his friends, though. There is a stigma around struggling with exams, he thinks: “If you’re stressed over exams that means you’re not prepared, and if you’re not prepared that means you’re not revising enough.”
Neither Ashraf’s problems nor his reticence in sharing them surprise Kerstyn Comley, co-founder of a new social media app designed to help teenagers with mild to moderate anxiety. MeeTwo, which 15 schools are already promoting to students, lets users post anonymously and receive support and advice about their worries from other teens. In the six months to November 2017, school-related stress about tests, exams and workload was the third most common topic, after family problems and mental health issues such as depression.
Schools are keen on MeeTwo because it is free, at a time when they are too under-resourced to deal with student mental health and wellbeing. It meets an important need, says Comley. “They recognise young people need other outlets and there are many in that early stage of anxiety who don’t want to come forward and talk to a teacher, or parent or even a friend.
“When you speak to young people they say ‘we don’t want to talk to an adult, because then the adult will have to do something about it.’ It’s not that they don’t want these problems solving, but they want to do it themselves.”
MeeTwo was created after Comley, a school governor, and her co-founder, Suzi Godson, an agony aunt and psychologist, got chatting. The project has been funded through grants and donations. As the service grows, they will look for corporate sponsorship.
All posts, which cannot be more than 300 characters, are seen by moderators who are trained and have experience in counselling or psychotherapy, so there is no risk of bullying, and MeeTwo experts can also post and direct users to help from other organisations. The founders are in discussion with Childline about ways to refer young people to them. In exceptional cases the moderator would contact the emergency services.
MeeTwo’s launch comes as the crisis in mental health provision for young people is at the forefront of school leaders’ minds. An early version was trialled by 60 to 70 pupils across three secondaries in 2015, including Bow school, in east London, where Ashraf and two other pupils are involved. More than 1,000 young people have signed up to the service, 40% of them boys.
The pilot schemes revealed that young people wanted help that was not officially linked to school, so they sign up privately rather than being given logins by teachers. But schools will hand out cards and talk about MeeTwo in assemblies and personal, social, health and economic education lessons. Comley hopes she will eventually be able to use data from the app to alert participating schools to the problems that are coming up most in their area.
John O’Shea, deputy head of Bow, says the school was acutely conscious of the impact of exam stress on its students – intensified by the ending of GCSE coursework – and jumped at the chance to be part of the pilot. “The app is really, really good for schools to be able to say ‘why don’t you try this?’”
MeeTwo has won an innovation award from TeachFirst and was named by HundrED, a Finnish non-profit organisation, as one of the 100 most important global innovations in education. Ultimately, Comley would like it to be the UK’s leading provider of support for early-stage anxiety.
“We regularly get young people either replying to the community or directly to MeeTwo to say ‘thank you, this has really helped me’,” she says.
For Ralph, 15, a year 11 student at Bow, who also took part in the trial, the peer-to-peer element is a major part of MeeTwo’s appeal. “Sometimes it’s better to get advice from other people your age, who are going through the same problems at the same time,” he says. “They can actually relate to the problem you’re having rather than saying ‘oh yes, I did this 20 years ago’.”
Ralph is convinced the government’s changes to education “have definitely had a big impact on our mental health, with more pressure in exams”.
“Because of the new grading system and the new content it’s really untested water … I do think there’s too much weight placed on the exams at the end of year 11. Your whole schooling career can be defined by an hour and a half in a sports hall.”
He and Ashraf both posted questions about stress and exams in the MeeTwo trial. “One person sent me five different ways to revise,” says Ashraf, now in year 12. “Two of them worked quite well.”
He found that giving advice, as well as receiving it, was therapeutic. “Knowing someone else has similar problems means you’re not the only one having those bad days.
“If they’re able to overcome it,” says Ashraf, “it gives you hope you can too.”
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