National pupil wellbeing survey needed to help schools understand causes of persistent absence and exclusion, conference hears

Calls for pupil wellbeing statistics to be collected as we do for many other aspects of schooling.

 

School leaders are “flying blind” without measures of their pupils’ mental health, to help them understand the context which might be behind a pupil’s absence from school, or their misbehaviour, a headteacher told a national conference on the subject this morning.

The conference, on introducing a national measurement system for children’s wellbeing, heard that there was a gap in the system currently.

For while England had among the most detailed pupil-level datasets in the world, providing statistics ranging from attainment to attendance and exclusions, there was no systematic national measurement of the state of young people’s mental health. This is despite growing evidence that the country is faring poorly, based on what data is available.

Sue Watmough, head of Manchester Communication Academy, an 11-16 secondary, said: “All the measures that are in place at the moment – attendance data, exclusions data – in a way there’s no point in measuring them on their own, because you are not getting to the causes. You are looking at symptoms, not causes. We need a wellbeing measure.

“In the absence of that, school leaders are working blind, because we are trying to come up with answers [on improving, for example, attendance] without knowing what’s driving this.”

Yet Ms Watmough said the “number one [cause of] safeguarding referrals” her school faced “is around mental health”.

Neil Humphrey is a professor of education at Manchester University who leads the “BeeWell” survey of children’s mental health, which has gathered data from 200 schools in Manchester, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton.

He told the "More than Grades: Why Children's wellbeing data matters" conference, staged by the organisation Pro Bono Economics, that, while this dataset was providing rich insights in relation to the tens of thousands of secondary students it surveys, systematic work was needed at a national level. He asked the audience to consider a “thought experiment,” whereby data was no longer available on pupil achievement in schools, or on attendance. This would be unthinkable, he suggested. So why was the country not investigating pupil mental health in the same way?

He said: “We have the National Pupil Database, data on pupil attendance, exclusions: if schools were not collecting that data, how could you get a sense of how our system works? It feels like a gap in the system at the moment, that we simply do not have that data.”

Branwen Jeffries, Education Editor for BBC News, who chaired the event, asked whether, given the attention that has been devoted in recent years to England’s performance in international tests, politicians should be doing more to shift the debate from this “more narrow focus to the broader lived experience of young people”.

As Education Uncovered has been reporting, the international testing studies PISA and TIMSS has had the UK low down international league tables in terms of measures of life satisfaction and belonging. 

Munira Wilson, the Liberal Democrats’ education spokesperson, has been tabling amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill currently going through Parliament, calling for a new national system for measuring wellbeing in schools.

She told the conference that children should be being asked systematically about their experiences in schools.

One aspect of potential controversy around such a system would be how the data is used. Ms Watmough said school leaders would be concerned that wellbeing data could be used as an accountability measure, on top of the many pressures that heads currently face. She suggested that schools might be held to account not on the levels of pupil wellbeing themselves, but whether institutions were taking actions to understand the state of pupils’ mental health.

Ms Wilson appeared, however, to be arguing that wellbeing measures might have to feature in school-level accountability, since it was the emphasis of datapoints within such a structure which forced headteachers to devote energy and resources to improving them.

Labour has not accepted the Liberal Democrat amendments during the bill’s passage through the House of Commons, with it now having moved to the Lords. Ms Wilson said that her party colleagues would be championing the new measurement system during the draft legislation’s passage through the upper house – as would Lord Gus O’Donnell, who is honorary president of Pro Bono Economics and how, she said, backed the idea.

She did suggest, however, that the amendments would be unlikely to make it into the bill. But events such as this were key to laying the groundwork for a change in that position in future years.

Ellie Costello, of the attendance campaign group Squarepeg, told the conference that it was campaigning for mental health to be included as a category when schools record the reason a child has not attended.

Some statistics were put forward at the event that seemed interesting to the debate around pupils’ school experiences, which Education Uncovered is likely to probe further. Findings from last year’s Children’s Society’s Good Childhood Report found that more young people (14.3 per cent) were unhappy with school than with the nine other areas of life they were asked about. And Bee Well found that eight per cent of children were “isolated” at school – in internal exclusion about a day a week, on average, and thus losing a significant amount of learning, even though they had not been excluded, said Professor Humphrey.

This website will seek to follow debate on this as the bill moves through the Lords, and all continue to cover the wider issue of young people’s life satisfaction.