Britain Get Talking

ITV’s Britain Get Talking campaign encourages the nation to look after their mental health by talking about what’s on their mind. In 2023 we decided to focus on a particularly urgent issue: the declining mental health of schoolchildren.

Getting schoolchildren to talk is not easy. When they come home from school they rarely feel like chatting, and sometimes they stop communicating altogether. With that in mind we developed the campaigns by working closely with people who understood them: mental health charities, child psychologists and teachers.

We focused on two moments in the year when children can feel particularly anxious and isolated: exam season (May) and the start of the school year (September). Our campaigns turned exams (No Silence Please) and homework (The Hardest Subject) from moments of stress into moments of connection.

We used conventional media but added ITV editorial, involved celebrities and generated PR to create a national conversation. We also developed assembly and lesson plans with the help of teachers to take the conversation into schools.

The ultimate test of our campaigns was how successful we had been in prompting action. Based on our results we prompted 79 million actions to protect people’s mental wellbeing. There is still a very long way to go to improve the mental health of schoolchildren but getting millions of them to tell someone what’s on the mind is definitely a great start.