Nearly 25 per cent of Welsh girls admitted to feeling worried at school in a new study by the Wales Institute for Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD). This compared to 16.5 per cent of boys.
WISERD questioned 1,500 pupils at 29 different primary and secondary schools across Wales.
It found that around 24 per cent of girls felt like they did not “belong” at school, compared to around nine per cent of boys.
Nearly 20 per cent of girls disagreed that their school was a place where “my teachers know me well”, compared to 12 per cent of the boys who were asked.
Study leader Dr Kevin Smith, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University, said: “The usual discussions about children’s schooling experiences often focus on academic achievement, personal development and school evaluation. Ask a teacher, parent or policy-maker what is the most important thing a school should offer and many will say it is education: they want children to develop the knowledge and skills that will help them build a career and grow into successful adults.”
However, he said in an essay for academic website, The Conversation, that the WISERD study showed that while girls traditionally achieved better grades than boys, they were less happy.
“While boys’ lower academic achievement in school is concerning, it is time to acknowledge that though girls may be performing better at school than boys, these experiences can be fraught with heightened feelings of doubt, alienation and anxiety,” he stated.
“It is important to remember that pupils don’t shed the complexities of adolescent life when entering the halls of the school. If anything, they are intensified for some.”
He added: “For the female pupils involved in our study, the realities of being a young woman in a patriarchally organised society remain explicitly and implicitly embedded in the social practices of schooling.
“For example, body image and social media activity are hot-topics linked to pressures that potentially increase girls’ emotional problems.
“Reactions to these issues often focus on their impact on girls’ lives without acknowledging how perceptions of women’s bodies in society are constructed and reproduced, and schools serve as an apparatus in this process.”
Dr Smith said the WISERD study, which received funding from the Higher Education Council Funding for Wales (HEFCW), showed that greater effort must be made to understand and improve pupils’ – especially girls’ – social experience and wellbeing at school.