Anxiety on the rise for primary school kids
Teachers say their students’ anxiety about National Standards testing is affecting their learning, while principals say they can’t access the outside help they need to deal with children’s mental health problems.
A survey of primary and intermediate schools by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER), released yesterday, shows 63 per cent of teachers agreed, or strongly agreed, that anxiety about National Standards performance had negatively affected some students’ learning.
That was up from 41 per cent in 2013’s survey.
While young students were feeling more anxious, only 20 per cent of teachers felt they had the training to help them recognise mental health warning signs in children.
Nearly 40 per cent of principals at intermediate and primary schools said they could not access support to work with students who have mental health issues.
NZCER senior researcher Sally Boyd, the survey’s principal author, said the survey showed overall that schools were doing many things to promote wellbeing, but schools were stretched.
The survey found more teachers disagreed that schools had systems in place to meet the mental health needs of students in 2016 than they did in 2013.
Schools were having difficulty in striking the right balance between learning and achievement, and wellbeing and positive behaviour.
‘‘Schools have a lot on their plates, to find that balance can be hard for them ...
‘‘There’s a lot of focus on numeracy and literacy taking away from wellbeing,’’ Boyd said.
Lesley Murrihy, principal of Amesbury School in Wellington’s Churton Park, said anxiety in children was rising, but she was not sure it was linked to National Standards.
It was a problem schools everywhere were talking about. There was a growing number of mental health issues in pupils, and it was getting harder to access support for students who needed it.
Social Investment Minister Amy Adams and Health Minister Jonathan Coleman announced a raft of measures on Monday as part of a $100 million social investment fund for mental health.
For schools, it included a proposal for a pilot providing frontline mental health practitioners in selected Communities of Learning, or clusters of schools.
The Ministry of Education said the frontline health specialists would enable early identification of potential mental health issues and on-site access for students to mental health care.
For those schools not in the pilot, other initiatives would include $25m to expand and enhance primary and community mental health and addiction care; and $5m to ensure support and follow-up for those who attempt suicide.
"Schools have a lot on their plates ... There's a lot of focus on numeracy and literacy taking away from wellbeing." NZCER senior researcher Sally Boyd