Variations in practice between schools

3.7.1 Creation of summary measures

To explore how practice varied, if at all, across schools in relation to the extent to which they promoted pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing, five summary measures were created for each of the five dimensions covered above, namely: school policies; school practices; pupil experiences;

teacher experiences; and programmes delivered.

Each measure ranged from 0 to 1 and represented the proportion of items from the list included in the questionnaire (see Appendix 1) that respondents indicated that their school were undertaking.

Thus, in relation to programmes delivered in school, if a respondent indicated that their school was delivering three out of the seven listed then their score on this dimension would be .43.

In addition, an overall score was created for each school by calculating their average (mean) score across these five dimensions.¹¹ Summary statistics for each of these five dimensions and for the overall measure of school engagement are provided in Table 10.

Table 10. Summary measures of school engagement in promoting pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing

Measure Mean Std. Dev. Minimum Maximum

School Policies .73 .25 .20 1.00

School Practices .75 .21 .40 1.00

Pupil Experiences .84 .12 .43 1.00

Teacher Experiences .60 .17 .11 1.00

Programmes Delivered .42 .20 .00 1.00

Overall Measure of Engagement .67 .12 .44 1.00

Finally, the responses to the 11 statements on promoting pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing included in the questionnaire (see Table 10 above), were combined to create an overall measure of respondents’ attitudes towards promoting pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing. This measure ranged from 1 (very negative attitudes) to 5 (very positive attitudes). The mean score for this sample was 4.49 (sd = .35), reflecting the largely positive responses provided by the sample and as summarised earlier in Table 8.¹²

3.7.2 Factors associated with variations between schools

A series of analyses were undertaken to assess whether schools varied in relation to their efforts to promote pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing in relation to:

 whether they were all-boys, all-girls or co-educational;

 their location in urban, rural or semi-rural areas;

 their type (secondary or grammar and controlled, maintained or integrated);

 the percentage of pupils in the school eligible for free school meals;

 the size of the school in terms of the number of pupils enrolled; and

 the attitudes of the school towards promoting pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing.

A summary of the findings from these analyses is provided in Table 11. Full details regarding all of the statistical analyses undertaken are provided in Appendix 3. As can be seen, none of the five characteristics of schools were found to be associated with the overall efforts schools stated they made in relation to promoting their pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing. In other words, it was not possible to predict how well a school engaged in such work on the basis of: whether they were single-sec or co-educational; their location; their type; the socio-economic background of their pupils; or the size of the school.

11 This overall measure had sufficient internal validity, with only one notable underlying factor associated with it (eigenvalues of the five factors extracted, respectively, were: 1.908; .988; .765; .732; and .607). The measure did have fairly low internal reliability however (alpha = .51).

12 This overall measure also arguably had sufficient internal validity with one notable underlying factor (eigenvalues for the 11 factors extracted, respectively, were: 3.53; 1.51; 1.16; 1.02; .88; .79; .66; .52; .45; .37; .12). Taken together, the 11 items also proved to be sufficiently reliable (alpha=. 73).

Table 11. Summary of variations across schools in relation to efforts to promote pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing

Overall Engagement

Dimensions

Policies Practices Pupils Teachers Programmes Single-sex or

A similar picture was evident when examining each of the five dimensions separately. As can also be seen from Table 11, for the most part these five characteristics had little effect on the different dimensions associated with schools efforts to promote pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing.

Of the small differences that did emerge:

 There was some evidence of potential differences between the different types of school in relation to the extent to which they had policies (p = .052, F4,91 = 2.45) and practices (p = .054, F4,92 = 2.42) in place to promote pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing. However, post-hoc tests to examine where these differences lay between the different types of schools proved to be inconclusive. As such, further research would be required to verify these particular findings and to establish the nature of these differences.

 There was evidence that schools that had higher proportions of children eligible for free school meals also had more provisions in place to support their staff in their efforts to promote pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing (r = .20, p = .055).

 Finally, there was also evidence that larger-sized schools made more provisions for their pupils in relation activities to promote their emotional health and wellbeing (r = .22, p = .028).

3.7.3 The effects of attitudes on variations between schools

Finally, there was evidence of a relationship between the attitudes expressed by respondents towards the promotion of pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing and the activities that their school undertook in relation to this. Not surprisingly, the more positive the respondents’ attitudes were, the higher their overall engagement score was (r = .22, p = .032).

When examining this further in relation to the five dimensions, the strongest relationships were found in relation to the positive association between attitudes and provisions for pupils (r = .27, p = .008) and teachers (r = .29, p = .005).

Given that most of the respondents were either school principals or Heads of Pastoral Care, then these findings do tend to lend weight to the importance of committed school leaders in driving forward a school’s approach to promoting their pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing.