In the context of both Loneliness Awareness Week and @RSE_day, our measurement of relationships and wellbeing among 7500 Australian school pupils demonstrates the protective effect of relationships. Experiencing relationship, not just learning about relationships, is essential if schools are to help pupils belong, learn and flourish. Do join us at our conference in September where you can explore these findings further, learn about our approaches to measuring relationships and collaborate with leading researchers and practitioners on relationships.
The government’s strategy for tackling loneliness states that ‘loneliness will also be embedded into the relationships education curriculum in schools’. Last year ONS issued their first report into children’s and young people’s experiences of loneliness. They found that 41% of children aged 10-15 who reported “low” satisfaction with their relationships with friends said they were “often” lonely. 27.5% of children who received free school meals said they were “often” lonely, compared with 5.5% of those who did not. The Love, Lust and Loneliness report which we wrote for FASTN looked at the experience of 16-18 year old males in the UK and found that 64% of the young men surveyed were worried about being alone and 47% said they feel lonely a lot of the time.
The ONS report highlights many links between loneliness and our education systems including ‘the transition points that challenge social networks’ (eg moving on from primary school or GCSE exam pressures) and ‘other education-related challenges that may trigger loneliness’ including sifting into groups, bullying and punishment practices. We’ve previously seen in our work with schools such as XP School in Doncaster that the right whole culture can have a profound impact on relationships. Now we have the wealth of data that demonstrates the protective effect of relationships.
Over the last two years we have measured the wellbeing of just under 7500 students in a group of Australian schools. We’ve also measured their relationships with other students in their pastoral classes or homerooms, and for many of them we’ve also measured their relationships with teachers. The size of our data set and the detailed demographic data about the students has allowed us to analyse the factors that are influencing their relationships and the impact this has on their wellbeing. One key finding has been demonstrating the protective effect of relationships. Students who have a strong relationship with another pupil in their class have above average levels of wellbeing – no other demographic factor is shown to lead to below average wellbeing for such pupils. And for those students with weaker student-student relationships a close relationship with a teacher is also a protective factor.
This is illustrated in the following chart which combines the measure of wellbeing (using the Deiner Flourishing Scale) with our measure of relational proximity (both on a 0-100 scale) and demographic information about the students including age, gender, academic attainment, parental separation, ethnicity and language.
The first level of analysis distinguished those students who have strong student-student relationships (>61 points) on our measure of relationships whose average wellbeing score is 78 compared to 71 for the others.
For the students with strong student-student relationships on the right-hand branch of the diagram, all other branches and clusters of students have above average wellbeing, except for those with weak student-teacher relationships. Demographic variables not shown did not reliably distinguish groups of students with different levels of wellbeing. This suggests that strong student-student relationships are highly protective of student wellbeing. If students are well connected socially at school, the data says it is extremely unlikely that they will experience poor wellbeing.
Looking at the left hand side of the diagram, there is still hope for students who are less well connected to their peers. If they have a strong relationship with their teacher, they can still end up with average or above-average wellbeing. This seems to be mainly the case with students in years 6 to 8.
In the bottom left corner are a group of students who have roughly the bottom 25% of wellbeing outcomes across the schools. They are the students who have more distant student-student relationships and distant student-teacher relationships, and who are in year 8 to year 12. Their wellbeing is about 8% below average.
These findings confirm what we have long known in theory. We know that relationships matter. We know from decades of research from institutions like Harvard or Cambridge, lessons drawn from tens of thousands of people, and hundreds of studies, and a myriad of the brightest sociologists, anthropologists and neuroscientists in the world, that relational wealth, not material wealth, is a stronger indicator of happiness throughout our lives, and that social isolation is a killer.
People who are “more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.”[1] Conversely, we now know that “people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, physically healthier, and live longer than people who are less well connected.”[2] We need relationships to be healthy, happy, to learn well and to live long lives.
Moreover, we also know that the ability of a child to connect to school (particularly from the age of 10 upwards) is a key protective factor that lowers the likelihood of health-risk behaviours, while also enhancing positive educational outcomes (Resnick et al., 1993; Resnick, 2000; Glover et al., 1998; Blum & Libbey, 2004; Libbey, 2004). We know that where attachment in the classroom context is more secure, relationships can surmount social inequality. And we know that where they are weak or fragile, they reinforce educational disadvantage.
Whilst the idea and premise of ‘relational health’ being a vitally important aspect of a school’s culture is widely recognised, it can often go ignored if unmeasured, even when indicators like bullying, disengagement and absenteeism suggest problems.
By ‘relationship’ we assume something that is more dynamic than a connection; rather a continual process where reciprocal engagement between two people defines the quality of the interaction. We draw on a wide range of experience in different contexts - including healthcare, prisons, business, government and peacekeeping - to offer a simple account of what shapes these relationships in schools.
Individuals and organisations often see the outcomes of relationships and are aware of at least some of the ways in which policies, structures, skills, working practices, technology, culture and other factors are shaping them. There are also usually some blind spots where at least one party’s perception of the relationship is not properly recognised. Our approach seeks to identify the blind spots and identify areas of strength and weakness. We do this by looking at the key factors that influence relationships as well as people’s experience of the relationship. This enables people to talk constructively, diagnose accurately, and generate effective responses.
We approach this using questionnaires which measure the distance in a relationship between two people or organisations and which determine how well each engages with the thinking, emotions and behaviour of the other. Respondents are asked to rate different aspects of a relationship on a scale of 1 to 6. An index score of 100 would mean that every respondent had rated every aspect 6.
For the student-student relational measurement, students were asked to complete 2 questionnaires, in respect of their relationship with one male and one female randomly selected counterpart in their homeroom. Where pupils spend more time in different subject classes or sets, sports teams or extra-curricular activities these pastoral class pairings may not capture their closest friendships or most supportive relationships. Nevertheless our research has found that measuring relationships in the homeroom reliably measures the overall strength of relationships across a school. We tend to focus on homerooms because these times offer the greatest pastoral and relational opportunities for teachers and students to interact and grow closer.
To investigate how a focus on relationships might support schools’ wellbeing goals, we asked students to complete the Diener Flourishing Scale.[3] This consists of items that, amongst other things, measures the level of happiness, hope for the future, satisfaction with life, and how supported they feel by their friends and teachers.
The results show a strong and striking correlation between the relational health and the wellbeing of students. Students who have healthy relationships with their peers, are far more likely to be thriving as individuals. They are happier, more hopeful, and more excited for the future. Relationships and wellbeing are mutually reinforcing: students whose wellbeing is compromised for other reasons may also be less able to form supportive and purposeful connections. Moreover, it reveals that those individuals who become socially isolated in their homeroom context are unlikely to experience supportive or rewarding relationships anywhere in school.
The wellbeing results demonstrate the benefits of a strong relational culture. They reinforce the value of identifying which students may be struggling to develop and sustain strong relationships with other pupils, and the best ways to create more enabling conditions for those relationships. The wellbeing results do not, however, explain what influences the relationships. The second blog in this series will summarise our key findings to date on the factors that most significantly shape relationships across these schools.
John Ashcroft, Research Director Relationships Foundation
[1]https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness/up-next#t-401774
[2] ibid
[3] E. Diener, Assessing Well-Being: The Collected Works of Ed Diener, London, Springer, 2009, p. 247-265