Starting High School Takes a Toll on Mental Health, and Adolescence Isn’t to Blame
16 June 2026
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A study of more than 20,000 Australian students found that switching schools hurts well-being for more than two years. The culprit isn’t puberty; it’s the transition itself.
When a teenager becomes more anxious, less motivated, and starts to slip academically right after starting high school, the most common reaction from the adults around them is to chalk it up to a phase, it’ll pass. A study from the University of Adelaide in Australia challenges that exact assumption, and the data is hard to dismiss.
What Made This Study Different
The research tracked more than 20,000 students at Australian public schools over seven years, monitoring eight dimensions of well-being: happiness, optimism, perseverance, cognitive engagement, emotional regulation, life satisfaction, sadness, and worry.
What makes the study especially solid is its methodology. In 2022, an education reform in South Australia moved seventh and eighth-graders into high school at the same time. That natural experiment allowed researchers to separate what’s driven by age from what’s driven directly by the school transition itself. And the results showed that the transition, not the maturing process, is the primary risk factor.
The Effects of Starting High School
All eight measures of well-being declined after students started high school. The hardest hit were cognitive engagement and perseverance, which, in practical terms, amount to a student’s willingness to put in effort and their ability to keep going when things get difficult. It’s no coincidence that these are also the factors most closely tied to academic performance and success later in life.
Mason Zhou, who led the study, explains that the transition forces students to start over on multiple fronts at once: a new environment, new social rules, heavier academic demands, and often without the teachers and friends who had been their anchors at their previous school. Seen that way, it’s easier to understand why the impact goes well beyond a simple adjustment period.
What may be most surprising is how long these effects last, persisting for at least two years. By the second year, just as academic pressure starts to ramp up, the support schools offer tends to taper off, right when students need it most.
The Groups Most Vulnerable to the Change
While the decline appeared across all groups studied, two stood out for how sharply their well-being dropped.
Girls showed significantly larger drops in well-being than boys. One hypothesis researchers offer is that girls tend to place more weight on interpersonal relationships and social belonging, both of which take a particular hit during the transition.
A similar pattern emerged among students from rural and remote areas. Despite starting from higher baseline levels of well-being before the move, they showed declines that persisted for three years after the transition. Moving from smaller communities into larger schools, combined with thinner support infrastructure, seems to intensify the effect.
What Schools Can Do About It
The study makes clear that student support needs to be ongoing, not a one-time effort. Welcome activities at the start of the school year matter, but they’re not enough on their own. Schools need to keep actively monitoring students for at least two years, paying closer attention right around the point when institutional support typically starts to fade.
Among the strategies researchers point to are mentoring programs, explicit instruction in study strategies, and socioemotional support that accounts for differences between boys and girls. For teachers, the study carries an important warning: a drop in motivation or engagement during the first and second years of high school is rarely a sign of laziness or disinterest. More often, it’s a sign that the transition hasn’t been fully processed yet.
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The full story, published by G1 in Portuguese, covers more of the study’s methodology and findings. Read it here.
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