Let's build positive momentum around young people moving more to feel good

By Andrew Lawton, Strategic Lead for Marketing and Comms | 11 November 2025 | TAGS: Mental Wellbeing, Children and young people, Andrew Lawton

Recently, it’s felt like I cannot go for a week without spotting new data, insight, or survey results, which tells us about how young people are struggling.

The latest came from The Children’s Society which found that children’s happiness was significantly lower than when their survey started, for all six aspects of life.

There’s also Mind’s The Big Mental Health Report 2025, the latest data from Girlguiding, and our colleagues at #BeeWell continue to provide robust insight directly from young people in GM.

I studied Maths and Sport Science at Loughborough University. I like data and try to use it regularly in my Marketing and Communications work with GM Moving.

My colleague Ella is excellent at finding and sharing the latest analytics from our website and social media channels. As a communications team, we try to use this to inform our decisions.

More broadly, having good quality, reliable data supports GM Moving, Sport England, and their system partners, to spend money in the best possible way.

But data alone cannot change the world.

We are not rational beings.

Humans rarely make decisions based solely on data.

Emotion is the driver in decision-making and behaviour change.

When it comes to our amazing young people, I try hard to avoid a sense of fatalism.

While data is important, I fear we are in danger of painting a picture of an impending doom for our young people, with an overload of crisis framing on wellbeing issues from many sources.

My concern is that, as Frameworks UK explain, people will conclude that tragedy is inevitable no matter what we do and, as a result, we don't act.

We cannot allow this to happen.

Let’s show how the problem can be fixed. Let’s offer solutions.

#BeeWell highlight: Listen. Act. Celebrate. It is vital that we listen to, and act upon, young people’s voices and we must celebrate the successes. Theirs and ours.

In Greater Manchester, the Feel Good Your Way campaign has a huge part to play here, and we need everyone to play their role. There will be further examples nationally.

Feel Good Your Way highlights the amazing organisations creating the conditions for young girls (11 to 16-years-old) to move more and feel better. And it’s available to everyone.

We’ve already met some incredible young people and been inspired by Faythe’s story. We need so much more to build positive momentum around young people’s wellbeing.

Positivity needs to be front and centre.

What stories do you have, or have you seen from partners, that tell a story about movement, physical activity, and sport positively influencing young people’s mental wellbeing?

How can we use #FeelGoodYourWay to improve the system conditions in education, leisure, and health so they’re better designed to support the mental wellbeing of our young people?

Let’s focus on progress, like the city-region commitment to tackle the gender gap in physical activity with the signing of the IWG Women and Sport’s Brighton Plus Helsinki Declaration.

There are positive stories to tell here. Let’s share them.