Measuring children and young people’s wellbeing in the school context

Abstract

Although being rooted in the work of ancient Greek philosophers, contemporary research on wellbeing is a relatively new phenomenon. As a term in the literature, wellbeing is often used interchangeably with others, such as happiness, flourishing, enjoying a good life and life satisfaction. Furthermore, the wellbeing of school-aged children is only beginning to be explored with increasing recognition that research conducted on adults cannot be uncritically applied to children and young people. This paper aims to address some of the complexities in conceptualising, and hence assessing, children and young people’s wellbeing by drawing on a recently completed study examining the role of creative initiatives in fostering wellbeing. The new instrument that was developed to capture children and young people’s perceptions of their wellbeing in school is outlined. Data are presented from a survey of 5170 students from 20 primary and 20 secondary schools across England that identify four dimensions of wellbeing. Differences in self-reported wellbeing relating to age, gender and type of school attended (Creative Partnerships versus other schools) are explored. The implications of these findings, particularly differences related to type of school attended, given the focus of this special issue, are considered.

Keywords:

• wellbeing
• students

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of the other members of the research team, Maurice Galton and Charlotte Page.

Funding

We are grateful to the charity, Creativity, Culture and Education, who funded the research.

Notes

1. We ideally wanted to capture wellbeing at the four different Key Stages in English schooling but decided that the youngest children (KS1) would be too young to complete a questionnaire of the type proposed, so the youngest age group would be starting KS2.

2. Given the complexity and sensitivity of capturing socio-economic and ethnicity data we did not attempt to include indicators of these.

3. The CP Programme, which ran from 2002 to 2011 when government funding was withdrawn, was administered by the charity Creativity, Culture and Education and operated in over 2700 schools in England. The programme aimed to foster long-term partnerships between schools and creative professionals to inspire, open minds and harness the potential of creative learning. See www.creative-partnerships.com/.

4. Local Area Delivery Organisations were the mechanism through which the CP Programme was delivered. These are independent organisations funded by Creativity, Culture and Education to employ creative agents to work with schools and find suitable creative practitioners for the projects agreed in each school. In working directly with schools, they were aware which schools ran the CP Programme particularly successfully.

5. Although there are socio-economic differences between schools, we did not attempt to assign schools to different socio-economic categories for further analysis as not all students in each cohort completed the questionnaire at secondary level and we did not have a student-level indicator of socio-economic status.

6. Parental permission was obtained but students were also given the opportunity not to participate.

7. Rescaled as 1 = not often, 3 = sometimes and 5 = often, to reflect the fact these represented the extremities of the scale.

8. In this paper we focus only on wellbeing inside school. However, the same factor structure was also observed in the wellbeing outside school data.