Commons hears call for nationwide measurement of children’s wellbeing in schools

Lengthy report also suggested that impact of school behaviour policies on children's wellbeing should be tested.

 

A campaign appears to be gathering pace for a national system for measuring children’s wellbeing at schools across England, amid concerns that the UK’s teenagers have been identified as the unhappiest in Europe.

On Monday, as the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill returned to the House of Commons, the Liberal Democrats re-iterated calls for a “national children and young people’s wellbeing measurement programme”.

An amendment was put forward to the bill by Munira Wilson, the party’s education spokesperson, which would see the government required to “conduct a national survey on the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people in relevant schools in England”. The survey would see results published and data provided “for the purposes of improving children and young people’s wellbeing”.

Ms Wilson told MPs, during day one of the bill’s report stage, that: “I am more than a little surprised to find so little about children’s wellbeing in a Bill with this title. One in four children in the UK reports low wellbeing, and according to the Programme for International Assessment [PISA] data, our country is the lowest ranked in Europe on that head.

“Data on children’s wellbeing and mental health is fragmented across the NHS, schools and local authorities. It is crucial that we collect data to understand the challenges that young people face and to develop solutions.”

It looked unlikely at the time of writing that the amendment would be adopted, with this being the third time that Ms Wilson has put it forward during the passage of the bill. The government has offered broad support for the concept of wellbeing measurement of young people, although whether it will go so far as to instigate this national survey remains to be seen.

Responding for the government, the early years minister Stephen Morgan said: “The Government recognise the importance of understanding trends in the wellbeing of children and young people; indeed, schools are already encouraged to measure pupil wellbeing.”

However, it was the argument of a detailed investigation on this subject, published six months ago by the organisation Pro Bono Economics, that England’s current piecemeal approach to the issue is insufficient, given a range of seemingly damning statistics which it presented.

Broader background

Pro Bono Economics set forward “the case for universal wellbeing measurement” in its document published last September. 

In it, it highlighted figures from the latest set of PISA assessments, carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and which include as their headline element tests in reading, maths and science. Data collected in the PISA study on life satisfaction, which were also picked up last year by the Children’s Society, found that “the UK’s children and young people have the lowest wellbeing in Europe”. 

The PISA statistics, based on questionnaire responses by 15-year-olds, had shown that the UK “ranked 70^th out of 73 countries surveyed by the OECD for the proportion of 15-year-olds reporting low wellbeing”.

Not only was the UK’s situation bad, but it was deteriorating faster than in other nations: in 2015, 15.6 per cent of 15-year-olds here had “low wellbeing,” based on their PISA questionnaire responses. By 2022, the latest data point, it was 25 per cent. And this could not solely be attributed to the pandemic, with the figure actually sitting at 26 per cent in 2018, and with the UK having the second-highest increase seen in Europe over the period, behind Germany*.

PBE’s document made a detailed case for using a national wellbeing measurement system to try to address this.

It stated: “Collecting comprehensive data on children’s wellbeing across England would enable policymakers to identify trends, gaps and areas requiring intervention much more effectively than takes place today.

“National initiatives such as the annual National Behaviour Survey by the Department for Education, the OECD’s PISA survey, the NHS’s Mental Health of Children and Young People’s surveys, datasets such as the Understanding Society survey, and the Children’s Society’s annual Good Children report all currently fulfil something of this role in important ways…

“However, these national surveys…are rarely sufficiently comprehensive to inform detailed policymaking.”

Such a survey could provide much greater analysis of, for example, gaps in the provision of Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services; the growing numbers of looked after children; of those with special educational needs and/or disabilities; and of those living in poverty.

Impact of school behaviour policies

Fascinatingly, the report also suggested that school behaviour policies could be an area of investigation, given its suggestion that too little was known about their impact on young people’s wellbeing.

The report stated: “It is essential that every level of the public sector – from the Department for Education to local schools – are commissioning the services and undertaking practices that are most effective at improving the wellbeing of the children they support.

“However, alongside a lack of data about the drivers of low wellbeing sits a lack of data about the solutions to it. A clear example is the current debate on how to respond to poor behaviour in schools.

“Some would advocate for a stronger punitive approach to poor behaviour, while others would say that aggressive student behaviour is a symptom of a failure to focus on building trusted relationships, which punitive approaches can put at risk.

“But these assertions are not based on deep evidence presently.

“Universal wellbeing measurement provides a route by which to overcome that, as services can quite simply measure the wellbeing of participants in their programmes before and after an intervention. Organisations can then identify a comparison group of similar young people whose wellbeing has already been measured in order to evaluate their impact.”

The report compares England unfavourably with Scotland in terms of the measurement of children’s wellbeing, Scotland having introduced a Health and Wellbeing Census across all 32 Scottish local authorities in 2021/22.

The report said “early estimates” had put the cost of introducing a universal wellbeing measurement system in England at £20 million, adding that this was a “small drop” compared to the £60 billion spent on grant funding of schools in 2024-25.

The wider campaign

It appears that these calls have quietly been gaining supporters. The Pro Bono Economics report is part of a campaign, backing a “national wellbeing measurement programme,” called “Our Wellbeing Our Voice”. PBE itself is one of four headline supporters of this move, alongside the Fair Education Alliance, the Children’s Society and an organisation called Bee Well.

Its website lists 46 other charity supporters, including the NSPCC, the Centre for Social Justice, the Scouts, the YMCA, the National Governance Association, the Centre for Education and Youth, Barnardo’s and the Centre for Young Lives.

Education Uncovered is very interested in all of this, and aims to continue to keep a close eye on developments.

 

*Separately, another set of international data, published in December after the Pro Bono Economics report came out, saw English teenagers sense of “belonging” at secondary school revealed by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) as among the lowest in the world.