As parents we endeavour to give our children a better start in life than we remember having. The danger is, that when we feel we have achieved this, we constantly berate our children with tales of our own hard upbringing. In my house this goes along the lines of . . .
Whilst there is no doubt that materially, most young people have much more “stuff ” than the wealthiest children 35 years ago, six months into my move to secondary education I am questioning whether I felt as much pressure during my teenage years as I see placed on young women today. NCEA undoubtedly provides an enviable range of subjects Son: Mum, I’ve been thinking that if I had a cellphone you – the breadth and depth of knowledge and skills on offer to wouldn’t need to worry about me because today’s students is far greater than that you would know where I am all the Access to the internet available to me in a UK high school time and our communication would be of similar size. A mix of internal and so much better . . . (glances at mother’s also provides an enviable external assessment also seems to offer unyielding expression and voice takes on a less focus on rote learning and greater slightly desperate edge) Mum, I’m 12 years source of knowledge fairness than performance assessed in old and I’m the only one in my class who – 35 years ago access to a single examination week. However, doesn’t have a cellphone! looking at the assessment calendar Mother: (adopts appalling version of knowledge depended on and the pressure to keep accruing Northern English accent) Eeh by gum lad, credits (preferably at excellence level) that’s nothing . . . when I were young we the skills and budget I wonder whether the result isn’t more were the only house on our street without allocation of my school pressure all the time? a telephone, if I needed to talk to me mam Access to the internet also provides I had to ride 5 miles through the snow librarian. an enviable source of knowledge – on a bike with a saddle so hard me bum 35 years ago access to knowledge would be numb for a week afterwards . . . depended on the skills and budget allocation of my school Son: Yeah OK Mum, before you get to the bit about climbing librarian. You can debate whether Wikipedia is reliable if you on your sister’s shoulders to look through the window and watch like but I know it is preferable in both content and accessibility the next door neighbour’s colour TV, does that mean I’m not to the slightly out of date Encyclopaedia Brittanica I shared with getting a cellphone yet? 1200 other students – until the library closed at 4.30pm of course! Mother: Yes. But along with the benefits of Google and Wikipedia comes Son: (in world weary tone) What’s for dinner? the insecurity inducing Ask FM and the pressure to get sufficient ‘likes’ on every witty (or not) Facebook posting. Looking back,
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the height of my giving in to the need to conform was tweaking my answers to Jackie Magazine’s Quiz “Tom boy or Boy magnet?” to get Mostly B’s (You are a fun girl and boys just love spending time with you but you’re not so drop dead gorgeous that you make the boys tongue tied!) We impress on girls the need to have a career plan and to achieve University Entrance, we also tell them that academics alone are not sufficient and they must display a broad range of interests ideally showing a balance of sport and arts and of course incorporating service to the community. At a recent workshop on teenage suicide I attended, guidance counsellors universally reported that anxiety levels amongst teens seemed to be increasing rapidly. Should the wellbeing of our students concern me as much as their academic performance? All of the students at my school perform well above average for their decile and 50 per cent of them go on to University – again well above average. We are a successful educational institution – isn’t that enough? Yet everything that I know about learning tells me it is more likely to happen when students are happy. Should we be running classes in happiness then? Don’t laugh – only last night there was a slightly mocking report on One News that schools in the UK are doing just that. The more serious background to this story comes from a report just published which found that: “Approximately 10 per cent of children in the UK currently have a mental health disorder and that since 2009 the life satisfaction of Britain’s young people had stopped improving and could have even begun to decline. According to the report, this could be due to factors such
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as pressure to have access to money, have the perfect body and lifestyle or to achieve in school and university.” (THE INDEPENDENT Friday 18 July 2014.) To give credit where credit is due we are ahead of the game here in New Zealand. In May 2011 Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Adviser, published a report commissioned in 2009 stating that, “Adolescents in New Zealand relative to those in other developed countries have a high rate of social morbidity. While most adolescents are resilient to the complexities of the social milieu in which they live, at least 20 per cent of young New Zealanders will exhibit behaviours and emotions or have experiences that lead to long-term consequences affecting the rest of their lives.” The statistics behind this summary can be summarised as follows: “By international standards, risk-taking among New Zealand adolescents is high. Excessive alcohol use is common; 70 per cent of New Zealand 12– to 17–year olds report that they have no problem accessing alcohol and 30 per cent of teenagers report that they made no attempt to control their drinking in order to avoid memory confusion or loss. New Zealand ranks fifth among OECD countries for rates of teenage pregnancy. New Zealand youth are at a high risk of sexually transmitted infections, those under 25 years having the highest rates of Chlamydia infection, gonorrhoea, genital herpes and genital warts. Finally, New Zealand has the highest rate of teenage suicide among OECD countries. (Improving the Transition: Reducing Social and Psychological Morbidity During Adolescence A report from the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor May 2011) The Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project, set up in 2012 in response to this report has resulted in ERO publishing ‘Wellbeing for Success: draft evaluation indicators for student wellbeing.’ The report is based on the research base premise that: “Student wellbeing is strongly linked to learning . . . Optimal student wellbeing is a sustainable state, characterised by predominantly positive feelings and attitude, positive relationships at school, resilience, self-optimism and a high level of satisfaction with learning experiences.” (Noble et al 2008) The tool identifies nine desired outcomes for student wellbeing shown in the diagram. One of my goals this term is to look at how we can use these to evaluate and then improve the wellbeing of the girls at our school. Will there be happiness classes? Who knows!
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