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Survey puts pupils’ mental health in the spotlight

11:43am - 16 September 2021
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One of Scotland’s biggest ever surveys into pupils’ mental health and wellbeing took place in North Lanarkshire during the first half of this year, with more than 40,000 children and their teachers taking part

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) asked pupils to reflect on the state of their emotional and behavioural health.

The survey was chosen to provide continuity with previous surveys and also to maximise knowledge and understanding about young people attending our schools and the challenges that young people face.

The findings will be used to address key priorities for the Children’s Services Plan.

Councillor Frank McNally, Convener of Education and Families, said: “One of the reasons for the survey was to assess the impact of COVID-19 on young people and to provide an evidence base to address any loss of learning which may have occurred during the pandemic.

“Overall, 41,324 (85%) children in North Lanarkshire engaged with the survey, an exceptionally high number for any survey and is unique in Scotland.

“It’s crucial that we listen to children and young people and to ensure there is high quality data about pupils’ wellbeing available to inform decision making about future policy and strategy.”

The general picture for children and young people in primary and secondary schools is encouraging, with primary teachers reporting a very positive picture for most of their pupils.

The report’s overall conclusions stated:

Secondary pupils continue to present a broadly positive picture, but they do note more difficulties than teachers highlighted for primary pupils.

Within both primary, and to a greater extent secondary, there appears to be children who are doing less well and further exploration of this information is required.

In North Lanarkshire, teachers report that a very high percentage of primary children are experiencing no difficulties as measured by the key SDQ areas.

This pattern is fairly stable across the age range (5-11 years). 5% of primary pupils fall into the ‘very high category’ of total difficulty and males are more likely to be rated as having difficulties as compared with females.

In secondary the majority of young people score themselves as ‘close to average’ across all key SDQ areas (between 55% to 68%). Seventeen percent of young people rate themselves to be within the very high category for total difficulties (compared with 12% in 2017).

Gender differences are evident with females reporting more difficulties on all the subscales (apart from prosocial behaviour) than males. There is an 10% reduction in the number of young people rating themselves in the close to average range, for total difficulties, from 2017 to 2021.

In the ASN provisions the total difficulties scores are higher which is in line with research studies (Goodman and Goodman. 2011).

This is particularly true for the children in the sample with a cognitive age of 10 and under. For pupil completed questionnaires, the majority of scores fell in the close to average range and most pupils (84%) rated impact to be in the close to average range.

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Page last updated:
16 Sep 2021

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