A study from a think tank has urged schools and education boards across the country to make sure they are doing enough to ensure that pupils are happy, confident and feel that success is an achievable goal in their life. 

While teachers' main job is to make sure they have prepared pupils for the big wild world after they leave school, a study compiled by Demos has discovered that while many pupils are in fact ready and armed with all the knowledge they need to succeed in the world, many are not confident of actually doing so. 

The study was designed to look at happiness levels of people between the ages of 14 and 18, and it was found that there is a steep decline between these ages. 

At the age of 14, 60 per cent of pupils are confident that they will be a success in life, but anxiety creeps in throughout the rest of their school years, and by the age of 18, only 33 per cent of school leavers said they were confident about their ability to succeed. 

Of the 18 year olds who were surveyed, the majority said they feel like there is often far too much focus on preparing people for succeeding in exams and passing their exams rather than what they will be using the skills they acquire for in later life. 

Report author Louis Reynolds said: "Mindsets matter - they can hold us back or propel us forward to achieve more. This insight needs to be applied more systematically in our education system. 

"Teachers, policymakers and education experts increasingly agree that a young person's wellbeing, success in education and overall life outcomes are affected by much more than academic grades - including their character attributes, and their social and emotional skills."

The government has said that it wants to allocate more money to schools to allow for greater levels of character education, which would allow teachers more scope for training pupils in ways that would give them more confidence about their future. 

The Department for Education said of the study: "All schools should create a happy and supportive environment helping children develop important life skills, such as resilience to support their academic attainment and give them the qualities that employers value."