Primary school children mostly happy and positive about learning, study finds
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Primary school children usually feel happy and safe, but their positive emotions about themselves tend to decrease as they get older, particularly for girls.
That is according to the latest edition of a landmark longitudinal study into the experiences of primary school children, which also found their main sources of anxiety were friendship issues and worries about doing well in school, as the transition to secondary school looms.
This report is the seventh edition of the Children’s School Lives project, which is carried out by researchers at University College Dublin on behalf of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA).
It captures the experiences of 4,000 children across 200 schools and tracks how it changes over time before, during and after the pandemic.
This report found while most children felt their classmates cared about them, issues with peers could also be a major source of stress for them.
“For some children, ‘fitting in’ and being included amongst peers is a challenge, and around one quarter of children in 4th, 5th and 6th class reported being a victim of bullying at least once,” the report said.
There were higher levels of bullying reported among younger class cohorts than older ones in the study, with the authors suggesting children may now be more comfortable in disclosing their experience of bullying.
In the study, bullying includes incidents like talking behind each other’s backs, excluding a child from play, fighting and verbal aggression.
Furthermore, the worry about “getting things wrong” in school was also a source of anxiety for children.
Girls tended to have more positive feelings about school compared to boys, but boys’ happiness levels were higher than girls from 4th to 6th class.
Comparing across two different cohorts of children — one group in 2nd class in 2023 and another in 2nd class in 2019 — children in the 2023 cohort had higher levels of worry and anxiety than the earlier cohort.
“Children in Cohort B ]the 2nd-class-in-2019 cohort] experienced an increase in feeling anxious from 2nd to 6th class,” the report said.
In this younger cohort, girls were also more likely than boys to comment on feeling sad when difficulties arose in their friendships.
“We also found that 2nd class children in 2023 report liking school more and having a more positive attitude towards learning than similar aged children in 2019,” it said.
“This could be because the children in 2nd class in 2023 would have experienced remote teaching and learning for significant periods of junior and senior infants classes, predisposing them to more positive views on school.”
While children were generally positive about school, their liking for it also decreased over time, with only interest in PE and Social, Environmental and Scientific Education sustained throughout the years.
The report also highlights efforts made by teachers and school leaders to support children’s wellbeing, with one teacher telling the researchers: “To me it means that the children in my class are happy. That they have the initiative to tell me if they are not. That they are confident enough to recognise and deal with their own feelings.”