The news about teens the Mail forgot to mention

Back at the end of October, the results of an annual nationwide survey of secondary school children were published by Ofsted, the people who bring you school inspections.

Oddly, the report doesn't seem to have been reported in the Sun, Daily Mail or the Telegraph (nor anywhere else that I've found). Which is curious. The media normally take an enormous interest in Britain's illiterate, drugged up, smoking, shagging, knife-carrying teenagers and this was a pretty big survey. It wasn't just some lazy journalist hunting out trouble and phoning a rent-a-quote MP. 150,000 secondary school children in over 3,000 schools across 145 local authorities completed the questionnaire.

I don't know why the good and noble journalists of our great nation decided the report wasn't newsworthy. There were a few things that caught my eye. For example

• 60% had never been drunk and only 10% had been drunk more than once in the previous month
• Only 7% smoked cigarettes
• 86% of year 8 and 10 students said they'd never taken drugs
• Over two thirds were happy with life and felt they could talk to friends and parents when they had worries
• Nearly nine out of ten felt very or quite safe in school
• Over half said they had never been bullied
• Half the students said that always or mostly enjoyed school and over 80% said they tried their best at school always or most of the time

The report didn't paint a completely rosy picture, to be sure. But neither did it fit with the simplistic media agenda of feral young people out of control, stabbing, shagging and shooting each other on a daily basis; nor did it paint a picture of things being much worse than they used to be.

I only came across the report when the BBC today reported on the breakdown of the figures by local authority, which they claim shows children in poorer, lower achieving areas, are happier than those in richer areas and kids in the north are happier than the soft southerners (I don't know if that's true - there's one document per authority so it would be a fairly major bit of data trawling to check the figures).

However, should you care, you can find how your local authority compares to the national average here. I'm not sure if those figures mean much, but unusually, the sample size is large enough that they could do.