Wales’ most extensive study of primary school children to date shows a third of Welsh pupils suffer emotional difficulties, though they occur most often among learners from low-income families. Half of 7- to 11-year-olds reported being bullied at school, even fewer ate fruit or vegetables daily, and most learners had troubles sleeping. To the Welsh cabinet secretary for education, Lynne Neagle, the findings made “sobering reading”: “It is important that we hear directly from children and young people to better understand how they are feeling and what is impacting them for us to shape future work we do.” The School Health Research Network (SHRN), responsible for the study, is a partnership between Cardiff University, Welsh Government, and Public Health Wales.
They describe this research as the most comprehensive of its kind—surveying more than 50,000 children, across 42% of Wales’ state primary schools. Particularly eye-opening are the trends among children from poorer families. Disproportionately, they face worse outcomes across a variety of metrics, including (but not limited to) mental health, healthy eating, exercise, worries over high school, and social media use.When coupled with greater context over poverty in Wales, the future looks disheartening, to say the least.
While overall poverty figures have remained largely stagnant, children have consistently faced the highest poverty rates for thirty years. Crucially, though, more of these people are being pushed into the deepest, harshest forms of poverty. A third of those in poverty were in the deepest forms of poverty in the late 1990s, but now in the 2020s, that has risen to nearly half of all people living in poverty.
To put this level of poverty into perspective—after housing is sorted, these people have around £100 to spend a week. A food shop alone could easily take up half of that budget, and that is without considering other essentials that families need to survive. This shows that child poverty is implicitly linked to the worse outcomes highlighted in this report.
Take the study’s findings about healthy eating, for example: children from the lowest affluence families were 15% less likely to eat fruit or vegetables every day compared with those from wealthier backgrounds. Healthy eating ranked high in terms of inequality due to family income, only being surpassed by exercise and digital device ownership, where the divide was even wider.Previous research backs that food insecurity is more common in households with children. As a result, it is no surprise that a previous survey by the children’s commissioner for Wales found that 45% of primary-school–age children worry about having enough to eat.
Another aspect about which the SHRN study found worse outcomes for pupils from low-income families was regarding vapes. The study found that vaping is “emerging” among pupils in Year 5 and 6, with 6% experimenting with vaping. The Welsh school inspectorate Estyn reported similar vaping trends in secondary schools and colleges earlier this year.
The SHRN says the key purpose of this report is to inform schools of their findings to increase school standards and the well-being of students. Case in point, Cogan Primary School in the Vale of Glamorgan have introduced a support programme based on SHRN data. Tom Lewis, the health and well-being lead at the school, said it has allowed them to design an initiative that “quickly made a positive difference” to well-being: “It’s invaluable for teachers to be able to access robust evidence such as this to ensure all our learners thrive.” However, the buck does not stop with primary schools.
Governments in Cardiff and Westminster have a role in tackling the wider problems which influence pupils’ experiences. For example, UK government could scrap the two-child benefit cap to help lift the 44% of British families in poverty who have three or more children. Meanwhile, Welsh government could look to Scotland—where the Scottish Child Payment has been attributed as the reason behind Scotland having the lowest poverty rates of any UK nation, by financially supporting families in poverty.
The Welsh government is already investing £13m annually into its “whole school approach” to mental health. On vaping, the UK-wide Tobacco and Vapes Bill is to impose measures tackling the visibility, appeal, and sale of vapes. Addressing educational issues early and effectively is vital to creating better outcomes, but also a population that can give more back to society in the long run.
After all, as SHRN’s director, Dr Kelly Morgan says, primary school is “one of the five key transitional periods in the lives of children and young people”.