State of Education Report 2017 state-of-education-booklet-Final-WEB | Page 27

“Signs of mental health issues among pupils
increase during exam/assessment periods”
2%
<1%
Strongly agree
48%
9%
6%
“Children’s wellbeing should
be the most important thing
to us, because without that,
they can’t learn.”
Simon O’Keefe,
CEO - Stour Academy Trust
skills have deteriorated, and a similar
proportion (41%) says they have stayed
about the same.
Academic resilience among young people
has not fared well over the last two years,
Tend to agree in either phase. More than four in 10 leaders
Neither agree nor disagree (42% at primary and 47% at secondary) say
Tend to disagree that academic resilience has got worse, while fewer than two in 10 (18%
Strongly disagree at primary and 14% at secondary) believe it has improved.
Don’t know
Pupils remain just as ambitious as previously in just over half of
schools (53% at primary and 51% at secondary), and are more so in
19% of secondary schools. While half of leaders in each phase believe
Pupils are less resilient than two years ago
that their pupils are just as tolerant as before, one in three (30%)
primary leaders and one in four (26%) of those in secondary settings
We asked school leaders to reflect on a range of skills and attributes
believe pupils’ tolerance of others has worsened.
that pupils might display and tell us in each case whether they have
improved or worsened over the past two years.
Primary leaders are more positive about pupils’ problem-solving
abilities, with 28% seeing an improvement here.
For more than six in 10 school leaders (61% at primary and 65% at
secondary), pupils are less emotionally resilient than two years ago.
In our 2016 survey, eight in 10 (79%) primary school leaders told us
that pupils did not have the expected social skills when they joined
reception class. It seems this situation has not yet improved: nearly
half (45%) of primary leaders this year report that children’s social
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More than a quarter (26%) of
school leaders think pupils’
problem-solving abilities have got
better over the past two years.
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