"I would like to say how much we appreciated the work you and your team have put in to this project, a big thank you for the excellent reports that you have completed on our behalf." Assistant Director of Public Health
Young People into 2017
Press release
EMBARGO until 12:01am Sunday 21st January 2018
The Young People into 2017 report
FOR FURTHER DETAILS PLEASE CONTACT:
Dr David Regis, Research Manager, SHEU Tel.(01392) 667272 Email. david.regis@sheu.org.uk
Dr. Regis is available for interview and comment in advance of the embargo on Sun 21st January 2018 during the working day.
We have just published Young People into 2017, which presents figures from 92,193 young people completing surveys in 2016. This report is the 31st in a series begun in 1987. The full report may be obtained in PDF format by application to SHEU.
Where are the figures from?
Every year, SHEU carry out healthy lifestyle surveys with young people for local authorities and each year these surveys involve tens of thousands of young people. At the end of each calendar year, we put all the results from all the surveys together, and publish a report. These reports contain findings from over 100 health-related behaviour questions using answers from pupils in primary and secondary schools. They tell us about what they do at home, at school, and with their friends.
What’s in the report?
The report has 7 chapters:
CHAPTER 1 - Food choices & weight control CHAPTER 2 - Doctor & Dentist CHAPTER 3 - Health & Safety CHAPTER 4 - Family & Home CHAPTER 5 - Legal & Illegal Drugs CHAPTER 6 - Exercise & Sport CHAPTER 7 - Social & Personal
The pages in each chapter show results from one question (sometimes two) and may also show links between questions and trends in responses going back over decades. |
What's new and different in these reports?
|
|
Some of the latest figures are different from those we last published in 2015, but not all the differences are new – it’s better to describe them as continuations of trends that we have seen going on for some time.
Dr David Regis, Research Manager of the Schools Health Education Unit, says,
“This report provides a snapshot of our young people as they were approaching 2018 and also offers some trends where we are able to look back over the last 30 years and more of our research.
“We have seen a further decline in young people's reported involvement with tobacco and alcohol. We saw a peak for many types of substance use in the mid-1990s, and since then there has been a general decline.”
“The fall in experimentation with cannabis by secondary pupils was quite marked after 2004 – ironically, a period when cannabis was briefly placed in Class C of the Misuse of Drugs schedule, which attracts less severe penalties – but the picture for the last 5-10 years is more level.”
“We see a long-term decline in pupils’ regular use of crisps –in favour of which other snacks or none, we don’t know. There has been a continued increase in the use of computer games by secondary school males, which is perhaps no surprise, but also in all pupils’ reported enjoyment of school lessons, which was harder to predict.”
“The individual questions and their trends are fascinating, but just as interesting are the connections we can show between questions from different chapters – so, we can see links between smoking and wellbeing, poverty, ethnicity and religion. Lesbian, gay and bisexual young people report being bullied more often than do others – and there is also more smoking in this group.”
Angela Balding, Survey Manager at the Schools Health Education Unit, says,
“Although we’ve seen a big increase in awareness of young people’s emotional health needs, the signals we see in the figures about poor and even declining self-confidence among young women are still there."
“Looking for links between the figures, we see again that, among 14-15yo females, the heaviest users of social media have poorer emotional wellbeing and possibly a less healthy lifestyle in general. But while we do know there is a toxic element of online interaction, including cyber-bullying, we can’t say that being online is overall bad for these young people – they may be getting a lot of support there too, without which their wellbeing might be worse.”
“A long-term increase in skipping lunch during the 80s and 90s has stabilised, although the figures for 2016 are still high – 18% of 14-15yo females. And we appear no better at engaging young women with exercise – their reported enjoyment of physical activities continues to decline.”
“After climbing for many years, the proportion of young people intending to stay in full-time education has been falling since 2014.”
Dr Regis adds,
“The range of topics we have been asked to look at with schools continues to expand, but that hasn't made the production of our annual reports any easier! We have seen some items dropped from the reports, as too few clients chose those questions for their surveys, while a few items have been added to the reports. New for these reports are pages on bullying in secondary pupils, and where possible we have included results from Year 4 pupils (8-9 year-olds), which we haven’t tried before. We also have updated our newly published findings about e-safety; second-hand smoke; perceptions of drugs; barriers to exercise; responses to problems, sexual orientation, and religion and belief.”
“As regards the aggregate data sets from which we publish this series of reports, they have become more complex and diverse. Are the figures still representative? We show in the report some evidence to show that the characteristics of the schools in the SHEU data sets are reasonably well-matched to the national population of schools, and that the results we see are comparable to those seen in national surveys using careful sampling methods.”
Notes
1. SHEU is an independent research, survey and publishing company. The Unit provides reliable baseline data for local needs assessment to inform plans in health, education and care.
2. The sample size was 92,193, but not all respondents answered all questions. Ages and year groups reported were:
Phase |
Year group |
Ages |
Primary |
Year 4 |
8-9 years old |
|
Year 6 |
10-11 years old |
Secondary |
Year 8 |
12-13 years old |
|
Year 10 |
14-15 years old |
3. We discourage surveys being conducted on Mondays, so ‘the day before the survey’ will have been a normal school day, and similarly ‘the week before the survey’ will not have been a holiday week.
4. The accumulated databank from the hundreds of school surveys we support each year, involving tens of thousands of young people, is a valuable resource of information and provides many opportunities for insight and research. But we caution against simple reporting and interpretation of our figures as being from 'a national survey'. Many authorities use us every other year, and so will appear and disappear from the data sets, and there are some trends in which we can see evidence of a regional effect in the figures we obtain – as in the case of figures for eating wholemeal bread on most days in the middle 2000s, which shows a ‘rollercoaster’: |
Headlines and trends from the 2016 data set (Young People into 2017):
CHAPTER 1 - Food choices & weight control
Headlines |
|
Trends |
|
Links |
|
CHAPTER 2 - Doctor & Dentist
Headlines |
|
Trends |
|
CHAPTER 3 - Health & Safety
Headlines |
|
Trends |
|
Links |
|
CHAPTER 4 - Family & Home
Headlines |
|
Trends |
|
Links |
|
CHAPTER 5 - Legal & Illegal Drugs
Headlines |
|
Trends |
|
Links |
|
CHAPTER 6 - Exercise & Sport
Headlines |
|
Trends |
|
CHAPTER 7 - Social & Personal
Headlines |
|
Trends |
|
Links |
|