Although the link between education and poor mental health has long been es- tablished, it has not often been examined in large-scale longitudinal studies. In this paper, we look at this issue in the context of a very recent and large scale study of adolescents in England. England is a particularly interesting country for analysing this issue because of a notably bad performance both on measures of child wellbeing and early drop-out from full-time education. For example, the UK made headlines in the last couple of years for ranking 24th out of 29 Eu- ropean countries on a league table of child wellbeing (Bradshaw and Richardson, 2009)
