Summary

PIRLS has shown that New Zealand Year 5 students are more likely to have a higher sense of school belonging than many of their international peers, but they are also much more likely to have experienced bullying at least weekly. Bullying has also been found to have a greater impact on Year 5 students’ reading achievement than their sense of school belonging. In this paper, Year 5 students’ reports of how often they felt happy when arriving at school (used as a simple indicator of their general well-being),¹ are considered in the context of school belonging and their experiences of bullying. We found that most students were often happy when arriving at school. A student’s individual socio-economic circumstances were related to their ratings of being happy, while the socio-economic composition of the school they attended had little bearing on how often they had this feeling. The conditions for being happy were, not surprisingly, influenced by Year 5 students’ experiences of bullying—students who rarely or never experienced bullying were more likely to feel happy when arriving at school than their peers who regularly experienced bullying. However, having a high sense of school belonging had a greater effect on how often students arrived at school feeling happy. The findings reinforce the important role schools have in creating positive learning environments for their students—a place they want and are proud to attend, and where they are treated fairly.

Key Findings

• In 2015, 80% of Year 5 students were often happy when they arrived at school, with girls and Asian students being the happiest (both 84%). Preliminary data for a 2020 Year 5 cohort suggests a small decrease (5 percentage points) in the proportion of students who often felt happy when arriving at school.
• Generally, being happy was not related to the size of the school, its location, or the socio-economic background of its student body. Students’ individual socio-economic circumstances appear to have had more of an effect than the school they attended.
• After accounting for gender, ethnic identity, and socio-economic status, Year 5 students who had a high sense of school belonging were three times as likely to arrive at school feeling happy than their peers who had just some or little sense of school belonging. Students who never or rarely experienced bullying were twice as likely to arrive often feeling this way compared with their peers who experienced bullying more often.

Footnote

1. This paper uses data collected in New Zealand in 2015, as part of PIRLS 2016