Study Finds Universal School Mindfulness Fails to Improve Mental Health

When mindfulness is pushed into every classroom as a blanket fix, the results have not matched the promise. New evidence from large school trials points to a reality check for parents, teachers and leaders: universal mental-health lessons, including mindfulness, have not improved symptoms overall, and some follow-up findings suggest they can even create unintended long-term harms.

The strongest test came from the MYRIAD project, a parallel-group, cluster-randomized controlled trial in 85 secondary schools with 8,376 students aged about 11 to 14 in the United Kingdom. After one year, the trial found no evidence that universal school-based mindfulness training was better than normal social-emotional teaching. The reported standardized mean differences were 0.005 for depression risk, 0.02 for social-emotional-behavioural functioning and 0.02 for wellbeing. MYRIAD did report an 83% probability of cost-effectiveness at a £20,000 willingness-to-pay threshold per quality-adjusted life year, and there were no intervention-related adverse events.

A later analysis of the same trial was even harder to ignore. It found that adolescents did not get a significant, lasting mental-health benefit from universal school-based mindfulness, and it pointed to low engagement and mixed attitudes toward the practice. That matters because mindfulness only works in school if pupils actually connect with it, not just sit through it.

The broader evidence base has not settled the question in mindfulness’s favor. One systematic review examined 77 school mindfulness studies involving 12,358 students across five continents. Another review published in 2025 said the field is still limited by too few high-quality studies and too much variation in how programs are delivered.

England’s Education for Wellbeing programme, which ran from 2018 to 2024 across 32,655 pupils in 513 schools, added to the caution. Its evaluation found that mindfulness-based exercises had no overall statistically significant impact on children’s and young people’s emotional difficulties at short-term follow-up. Another arm of the programme, Youth Aware Mental Health, involved 12,166 pupils across 153 schools and also produced an unexpected negative finding on emotional difficulties.

The debate now is less about whether mindfulness has a place in schools and more about where it belongs. Willem Kuyken and colleagues at the University of Oxford have said the school mindfulness programme did not help young people overall, even as it improved school culture and reduced teacher burnout. Lucy Foulkes has argued that universal lessons can normalize symptom-checking and bring unintended consequences when every pupil is treated the same. That leaves a clear message for school systems: targeted support for pupils who need it may be a better use of time, attention and trust than a one-size-fits-all mindfulness lesson.