A New National Study Will Follow 8,632 Children. Nobody Will Ask Them How School Feels.

Some of the young people who join The Haven haven’t been inside a school building for months. Some haven’t left home. And almost all of them, years earlier, were children a spreadsheet would have called fine. This week the Department for Education published the first findings from Five to Twelve, a study that will follow 8,632 children from age five to age twelve. It will measure a great deal. It will not ask the children how school feels.

Five to Twelve is a longitudinal study run by the National Centre for Social Research for the DfE. The children were aged 5 to 6 in the 2023-24 school year, and researchers will return to them again and again through primary school. That makes it genuinely valuable: it will track children through the exact years when, for some of them, school quietly stops feeling possible.

The report has a whole chapter on the child at school. Teachers are asked whether the child is predicted to meet expected standards, how they behave, whether they are bullied, and how close the teacher feels to them. The children complete cognitive assessments in verbal skills, reasoning and working memory. Every measure is careful, and every one of them is a view of the child from the outside. Nobody asks the child whether they like school. Whether they feel safe there. Whether they belong.

For the learners we meet, that unasked question is where everything started. A young person can perform well on every assessment and still be using everything they have just to get through the day. By the time distress becomes visible in the data adults collect, she may already be at home, unable to walk through the school gate – and wondering why nobody noticed sooner.

The study also shows how early the system starts forecasting. At five, children with special educational needs were already less likely to be predicted to meet expected standards at the end of primary school. Many of our learners lived through primary years shaped by exactly that kind of forecast. A forecast, on its own, changes nothing. What changes things is an environment where the answer to “do you feel safe here?” becomes yes.

At The Haven, the first work isn’t academic. Cameras can stay off. Nobody is asked to speak before they’re ready. Back to Balance, our twelve-week course, is a gentle reintroduction to learning for young people who have been out of education for a long time, sometimes years. Most of our educators are neurodivergent themselves, so they teach from lived experience of what school can feel like from the inside. Mentoring and community are built in, not bolted on.

And here is what we see, over and over: young people who had been thoroughly disengaged from learning re-engage remarkably quickly, not because anyone pushed, but because it finally feels safe. Learners who couldn’t speak out loud in a lesson find their voice. The question nobody asked them turns out to be the one that unlocks everything else.

If your young person can’t currently attend school, they haven’t stopped being able to learn. They’re waiting for learning to feel possible again. Back to Balance is often where that starts, and we’re always happy to talk about whether it’s right for your family.

Source: Department for Education, Five to Twelve: year 1, published 12 August 2026.