"I don't have many friends, but the ones I have are good [...] I don't think I need more friends" (Steve, 7th grade)
"School is not that good. I just lose a lot of motivation for things [...] It's mentally hard. Now we're teenagers too, so I think it's a bit like hormones doing it." (Tillie, 7th grade)
Tillie and Steve are two Danish school pupils who are part of a Nordic research project investigating the well-being of children and young people in the Nordic region. Their statements come from qualitative interviews with children and young people in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland, which, together with questionnaire responses, form the key data sources in the first part of the project.
Professor at the University of Southern Denmark Ane Qvortrup leads the project Societal Security after COVID 19 - Inquiring Nordic Strategies, Practices, Educational Consequences and Trajectories (INSPECT). It is part of NordForsk's research on societal security. The aim is to explore the medium- to long-term consequences of the pandemic for societal security and the notion of a Nordic community. Among other things, the INSPECT project focuses on how the pandemic has affected the well-being, values and aspirations of children and young people.
"As you can see from Tillie's and Steve's statements, several of the pupils included in our study are experiencing a development in their well-being. Wellbeing is not a constant. In the public debate, we risk painting an incorrect picture of children and young people. Therefore, with our research, we hope to provide a knowledge-based basis for the well-being debate," she says.
Social, educational and emotional wellbeing
Students were measured on their educational, social and emotional wellbeing.
The researchers conducted cluster analyses and found four clusters among the students in each country. The clusters vary from country to country, but all countries have a cluster where students score low on educational, social and emotional well-being. Approximately a quarter of students in Norway and Denmark are in this cluster, while in Iceland, a third of students are in the most negative cluster. All countries also have a medium cluster, which is average on all parameters - social, emotional and educational wellbeing. However, Denmark is characterised by students scoring low on educational wellbeing. One third of students in Norway and Denmark are in the middle cluster, while a quarter of students in Iceland are in the middle cluster. Last but not least, all countries have two more positive clusters. Remarkably, however, in all clusters, students in Iceland are characterised by generally lower wellbeing than the other countries.
The cluster of students who score highest on all three wellbeing parameters represents 32 per cent of all students in Iceland, 33 per cent in Norway and 37 per cent in Denmark.
When looking specifically at educational wellbeing, Danish children and young people in particular stand out negatively:
"Studies of Danish school students have shown that educational well-being in particular has declined over a number of years, and it is now lower than emotional and social well-being. It is remarkable that in the large INSPECT project we now find that Danish pupils also excel compared to the other Nordic countries in this respect, and that children and young people in the other Nordic countries do not score low on educational well-being to the same extent. Icelandic pupils, on the other hand, are significantly lower than pupils in the other countries on social well-being."
The Nordic Region has some very special school values
Despite the differences between the well-being of Nordic school students, Ane Qvortrup emphasises that the Nordic region has some special school values that are common to all countries. One of these values is that we have a strong tradition of student-involving teaching and group work, which was challenged by the need to keep a large distance in the classrooms and sometimes teaching digitally.
"These are some of the basic values of the Nordic welfare countries that we see shifting among students these years. Therefore, I think we have a big task ahead of us, which is not just a question of ensuring students' grades, but we also have key value questions, such as what values do we want to give our young people in the Nordic region?" she says.
"I would also like to emphasise the strong focus on well-being in Nordic schools, which gave us the freedom during the pandemic to not focus so much on educational results, but instead ensure that students got through the period in a sensible way," says Ane Qvortrup.
We are committed to learning from each other
The common Nordic school values also make it incredibly important to learn from each other, emphasises Ane Qvortrup.
"When we see that Danish pupils have lower educational well-being than the other Nordic countries, we are obliged to look to the other countries, because I think this is the core of our Nordic school. We also have to ask ourselves why Icelandic students are lower on social well-being. We are obliged to learn from the pandemic situation, because we have had a complete re-calibration of the school and we should learn from that. A comparative approach in the Nordic countries is hugely valuable because you had different school closure models in the Nordic countries," she says, adding:
"School research is a limited research area in each Nordic country, so it makes sense to co-operate across the countries. When we co-operate, the Nordic region is stronger as a whole, which is important instead of looking at ourselves as individual nations."
A year after the first student responses from Tillie and Steve, they answered the questions again, and by then, wellbeing had changed for both of them:
"It's much better. The class has got a much better sense of community. So I think it's good now." (Tillie, 8th grade)
"I've become much more part of the community, I get invited to parties and I'm not always the last one picked." (Steve, 8th grade)
HOW THEY DID IT
The study will run for three years and will repeat both questionnaire collections and qualitative interviews from school pupils in Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Denmark over the next two years. The students' ages range from 4th to 10th grade. In addition, they have questionnaire responses from teachers who answer questions about the teaching profession. The quantitative questionnaires are supplemented with qualitative interviews with both students and teachers, data on strategies used to ensure Nordic values in the different countries, and observations of school practices.
