posted September 10, 2004 05:01 PM
http://positivenews.org.uk/cgi/zyview.pl/D=articles/V=story/R=1309
With SATs and League Tables, it seems that we have more measurement than ever before in schools, but only assessing academic success.
Pioneering research to measure children’s well-being has been conducted by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). It has already been shown that well-being in adults is closely related to long-term health and the ability to cope flexibly and creatively with life’s challenges, so it is clearly an important quality to develop in children. NEF worked with Nottingham City Council questioning over 1,000 children and young people from 7-19 on two key indicators: satisfaction and curiosity. Whilst most research into well-being focuses purely on satisfaction, NEF’s research suggested that this second element of curiosity or personal development is equally important to long-term health. They were very surprised to discover a huge difference between primary and secondary school children. Whilst 65 per cent of primary children rate their school experience as positive, this dropped to 27 per cent of secondary school pupils. 71 per cent of primary children felt they learnt a lot, but only 18 per cent of secondary children felt that they did.
Children become bored, stop learning and do not enjoy school activities once in secondary school. This undermines their curiosity and personal development.
Another interesting find was that the academically top-performing primary school had a significantly lower well-being score than other primary schools, raising the question of a possible trade off between academic success and curiosity and personal development.
The survey suggests that there is a need to evaluate the way in which pupils are being taught in secondary schools to enable them to retain and develop the well-being that they experience in primary school. NEF hope that the government will now put together a longer survey over a wider area, which will look more closely at the connections between well-being, education and health.
Lindaland
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posted September 10, 2004 05:01 PM
posted September 10, 2004 05:49 PM