A NAPLAN for Wellbeing?

If learning and wellbeing are considered as equally important in schools, why do we have systematic measures for one but not the other?

Since COVID, schools have seen a clear increase in student behavioural issues and mental health concerns. While we talk a lot about the importance of student wellbeing, it seems we are less sure on ways to measure it. 

Schools engage in numerous approaches to improve student wellbeing. Social-emotional learning, mental health awareness training, providing an inclusive education, implementing behaviour management strategies, and using educational policies to inform equity and school safety protocols.

What if schools could measure the specific relationships between their students? That is, know how students are socially connected in both positive and not-so-positive ways. Not just ‘Do you feel supported by your peers?’ but ‘Which peers provide you with support at school?’ and actually know who those students are. Further, imagine schools could map these social connections as a peer-to-peer network of relationships, and then see how this interacts with student behaviour and mental health, creating a data-driven decision making approach to student wellbeing.

Well, we can do this, and some schools already are.

Where is our ‘NAPLAN for wellbeing’?

There are obvious and valid criticisms of NAPLAN. 'Teaching for the test' is highest among them. Making data publicly available and pitting school against school in tables of achievement. It is yet another thing for teachers and school leaders to do among all the other work they do. More paperwork, more bureaucracy, more compliance. Is it actually meaningful?

But in terms of student wellbeing, what if we did not have these restrictions? What if we had data that was insightful and valuable, used by the school to help students? What if we did not make it publically available as some form of inter-school competition, but instead for school leaders to use to understand what was happening for their students and how they could help them?

And when we help students with their social, mental and academic wellbeing, we also help stressed teachers and principals who are leaving the profession in droves. In schools, parent demands have indeed become higher, but the demands of dealing with student issues have not dissipated - they have also increased. Imagine teachers having more time to teach rather than dealing with behavioural issues. 

If we could use data to understand students but not punish schools. 

If we could improve student mental and social wellbeing, helping students and teachers.

If we could use data in a supportive but non-bureaucratic way.

Then yours would be a school at the forefront of student learning and wellbeing, and, which is more, you'd be a school that every student wanted to go to and every teacher wanted to teach at.

We could. We can. SNA Toolbox does. 

(With apologies to Rudyard Kipling)