England State School Pupils As Happy With Life As Private School Peers
Categories: US Education News
Young adults and teenagers who went to state schools in England are as happy with their lives as their peers at private schools, according to a new study by researchers at University College London.
The research found few differences in mental health or life satisfaction between the two groups, which surprised the study’s authors because of the substantial advantages in spending on wellbeing and support enjoyed by those at private schools.
Dr Morag Henderson, of UCL’s social research institute, the paper’s lead author, said: “Although school resource is greater in private schools, the academic stress students face might be too and so we see each force cancelling the other out.”
The study – published in the Cambridge Journal of Education on Thursday – is based on responses from a national sample of more than 15,000 people born in 1989 to 1990 who attended school in England, and were surveyed as teenagers and later in their 20s.Girls at private schools did report better states of mental health at the age of 16 than their peers at state schools but the same gap did not appear at the age of 14 or 15.
The study concluded that “there is no additional advantage of private schooling with respect to mental health and life satisfaction” for the cohort it studied. But it cautioned that private schools have further increased their spending on wellbeing and pastoral support in the years since the sample group attended school.
Earlier research among those born in 1970 found that attending a UK private school was associated with “heightened psychological distress” among women. But since the 1980s private schools have greatly increased their spending on supporting pupils.