Pupils’ enjoyment of school suffers ‘substantial decline’ in Year 7, study finds

34 comments

1. No surprised. Suspect it’s always been that way. Going from primary school to high school is a daunting experience.

2. That’s about the time they have to start actual learning things and putting some effort in. It’s also the time those who want to learn about the world can really open up and thrive.

3. well duh. they go from being the biggest and oldest in primary to the youngest and smallest in secondary. they now have multiple new teachers, news classrooms and new social dynamics to contend with and more homework, expectations and hormones to deal with.

   schools know this. year 7&8 are for settling the kids into secondary. year 9 preps them for GCSE subjects and year 10-11 is for GCSEs. once they have done those, kids feel better in sixth form because they have accomplished something major and they are bigger and their hormones settle somewhat.

   but the social pressure from all around in year 7 is huge and would weigh on anyone.

4. The marketisation of secondary school selection probably doesn’t help.
   Long gone are the days when everybody in a local catchment area went to the local primary school, and then basically the entirety of the academic year moved from that primary school into the local secondary school together.

   Now, through the wisdom of league tables and parents who think they know best, an enormous number of kids are moved away from all their mates and shoved into an entirely different community where they’re asked to build an entire new network of friends from scratch. Often for such meaningful reasons as ‘because the school we’re sending our kid to got a _slightly_ better Ofsted report than the local comprehensive’ or ‘because 77% of school leavers at the new school got passes in all their GCSEs, compared to only 74% at the local comprehensive’.

5. [removed]

6. Just read this out loud and my 12 year old clapped so hard

7. We need to consider to what extend the school environment is impacting wellbeing, and to what extend this is symptomatic of the regular angst of puberty,

8. Primary school: (Application focus)
   Teachers care about children understanding what they are taught.

   Secondary school: (Grade focus)
   Teachers are forced to make sure children are able to pass regardless if the students actually understand or can apply what’s being taught.

9. * Being suddenly moved into a class that may or may not include people you know.

   * Constant comparison to other children at different stages of development (being pre-pubescent and forced to shower with someone who hit manhood like a brick wall, does *wonders* for self confidence /s).

   * Sudden increase in discipline.

   * No access to mental health support or guidance.

   * Constant pressure to decide right there and then what you want to do for the rest of your life (joke’s on you: the economy is fucked so unless you’re very, very lucky, you’re stuck on the bottom rung for life).

   * Being constantly reminded that you’ll spend the next five years of your life either taking exams or preparing to take exams.

   Secondary school was hell.

10. Enjoyment and school never were good together in a sentence, even 20 years ago!

11. I wonder why?

    Oh yeah, that’s the year I started getting openly assaulted with no repercussions.

12. Secondary school, in year 7 was where I had the first rumor spread about me, which pretty much set my social standing for most of my time at my school. It did get a little better towards the end. But that one rumor really caused a lot of issues for me

13. Let’s not forget about sitting in Isolation too as a punishment. Tiny room, no windows 🙄. Oh and having Mr Bad coffee breath, screaming in your face and belittling you😅

14. I dropped out at the beginning of year 7, honestly I was already so done with school by that point that it would have had to been amazing to want to stay. With my dyslexia I was learning literally nothing in school, and it had really messed with my desire to socialise so I wasn’t getting anything out of that side either.

15. It’s almost as if education should have evolved…..but has not! Year 7 should be the year of citizenship. Understand your country and world beyond .

16. I wonder if the same is true in Scotland, where they stay one more year in primary school before moving up in Year 8?

    Definitely worth considering.

17. This might be unpopular on here, but I think this is one area where the Americans have it right (or at least better). In the UK, when you’re 11, you’re chucked in with people who are near adults, much bigger than you and it’s very daunting. It’s like being a hobbit in Gondor and even when I was at school, I always found these arrangements odd to say the least. Am I being wrong when I suggest we should perhaps have a change in the system where we have a “middle school” maybe for years 7-9 and a higher bit for years 10+?

18. It’s no surprise, so much more pressure is put on them from the start

19. For me, it was the complete opposite. I HATED my primary school experience, but my secondary school experience was great.

20. I’m not surprised. Year 7 is the most carefree year, but you’re also being told constantly in almost every lesson that everything you do is important and that it’s affects your university prospects, so that internal stress starts building from either early in Yr 7, or Yr 6 if you’re unlucky. Many other factors go into a pupil’s happiness, but this is one oft-forgotten one that would definitely be constantly nagging in every schoolkid’s mind for the next 5+ years.

21. I’m sure this is true. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that “something must be done”. My own kids are just going through / about to go through this and it’s tough, no doubt about it. But that’s the idea, we gradually ramp up what we expect of children from nothing as a baby to everything as an adult.

    The aim has to be to do that gradually, avoid overwhelming them while continuing to make progress. Year 7 is always going to be one of the bigger steps, and schools already know that, they do far more work on the transition than they did when I went through it.

    Always worth remembering that there’s a fixed end point to this at the end of education. If we take some stress off children, we’re not really removing it, we’re just delaying it and they’ll get it all in one lump at exam time or when they have to go to work.

22. Years 7-9 were an absolute hell hole for me; bullying, depression, self harm, I (unknowingly) had ADHD back then too so no one understood why I couldn’t get my shit together and I was put in the SEND classes despite not needing that kind of help – the whole experience just fucking sucked. Year 10 & 11 were so much better and I had a blast. This article doesn’t surprise me at all.

23. I started working in education in mid-1990s and saw an incredible decline in engagement and enjoyment around 2010 (though things like the National Strategies before then contributed). Gove’s “Reforms” brought intense pressure after 2016 to staff and children. There was an ongoing churn of staffing with older, experienced staff leaving in large numbers and were replaced by very young, inexperienced staff who either left quickly or hurriedly moved into senior management. Schools attempted to deal with widespread weak teaching by micromanagement and harsher, authoritarian systems of behavioural control. Equally, as funding (in real terms) was reduced, the curriculum was narrowed and in many schools reduced to just the “essential” GCSE subjects. In a number of schools teaching GCSEs began in Year 7 (even though “officially” this wasn’t allowed). Less time and money for trips and extra-curricular activities… etc… And then, from time to time, we hear that UK children are among the unhappiest in the world and dislike school more than other countries – and there’s the repeated pretence of shock.

    Political interference and the the emergence of a highly-paid managerial elite in schools are at the heart of this. Schools are toxic places.

24. I was in the last year group that did year seven at primary school, the gulf between primary school and secondary school is immense, at the year seven age band, no one is ready for such a change! The amount of bullying both direct and indirect (the stigma around backpacks bigger than the students anyone?) that I saw year sevens experience when I was in year 9-11 was wild, secondary school seemed to break any carefree hope and optimism from the year sevens very quickly.

25. My daughter loved school when she was in primary.

    Now she absolutely hates school since starting year 7.

    The expectations and educational pressures trusted upon them, along with very little support from their teachers past making sure they pass their tests every half term is why kids suffer so much in their first year of high school.

    There’s no transition bar one day whilst their in primary school. So these kids have gone from a comfortable supportive setting where their emotional and developmental needs are nurtured, to suddenly being treated like employees in a business.

    They’re children.

26. Tale as old as time, especially for the neurodivergent crowd. You go from “gifted” & supported, as children should be, to being treated like an incapable dumbshit *and* an adult at the same time.

27. Some of the basic issues are:

    * Good Primary schools are more of a close knit community and size is more human scale in total on relationships vs a sea of strangers.

    * Young Children are natural learners and want to please adults if they have been brought up with good behaviour and stable habits. They do start loosing this as they approach Puberty and Year 7 tends to be the last year of it but also because:

    * Year 7-8 are almost 100% a total waste of time and the disillusionment of the kids finally grows into realization they are being siloed in classrooms eg “make another poster again for a cover lesson!!” Totally pointless.

    * As said the change from village community primary to factory size secondary does not help either in addition to wasting their time and the kids finally realizing this as well as puberty and establishing their own boundaries via pushing back on the environment eg teachers and schools.

    * A lot of the childlike natural resilience to poor home background begins to crumble around this age and probably in conjunction with the above changes as well as internal and feeling like shit too often and some of the worst behaviours start popping up.

    In summary, some of the comments made are not constructive eg “it’s always been this way” or “of course going from being biggest to smallest is going to make them feel that way”. On the surface it is accurate but it is not helpful, because fundamentally what it is saying is the society in the UK has a seriously FUP system in place for the development phase of young humans and treats it as a mechanical sorting process via logistics and financial budgets eg catchment, £/pupil etc and ends up with sausage factories and kids who feel like S all the time and can’t understand why. Maybe because the society created a really crap system of school processing?

    Ie the complexity of shaping a high quality human development process is a lot higher than palming it off to policy level planning and inertia considering the system just about manages to muddle along each year. I mean all the money the UK has generated in decades and decades and it can’t come up with a saner system that generates higher quality results in the people who will go on to be society in the future?

    At the other end, most of these same students coming out of Year 11 will have almost zero use for most subjects they took and forget all the information in many of those subjects within weeks of leaving school. But they will have become young adults and that seems to be half the story of secondary to corral the kids until they are no longer children.

28. Bullying exploded in secondary school in comparison to primary school. I also went to a very small school to a massive one which didn’t help.

29. When I started secondary school, I immediately became the kid that all the other kids I grew up with from my primary school picked on, in order to look cool in front of their new peers. Suddenly all these children I’d known and been friendly with since I was 4 were calling me gay and making fun of the way I talked, which caught on and escalated and lead to five years of extreme physical and emotional bullying. Secondary school is brutal, and it was no better for my autistic brother who, thanks to his classmates, developed an eating disorder which killed him at 26. That’s before you even get to the school work.

30. You don’t even need to be bullied for those early years to be pretty rough. I was pretty quiet and shy and just never really found a friendship group until a few years later. It was low key stuff like people not wanting to speak to you, not wanting to sit next to you in the dining hall, or the dreaded sports selection where you’d be picked last every time.

    That all changed by year 9 thankfully, when I had become more confident and settled into some hobbies etc. I do sometimes wonder though, if I ever had kids, how could I prevent them from having that same crappy and isolated experience I had in year 7/8?

31. I taught Y6 (work as a tutor now) and I remember in 2022 within the first few weeks of September, I got a message from the office saying there’s a load of Y7s at reception waiting for you (this was after school). They’d all come back to seem me for some fussing and to say they missed my class. Having one teacher all year (I actually had them in Y5 too) makes a huge difference, and I don’t think teachers can have the same positive relationships with kids in secondary due to the nature of it – and believe me positive student-teacher relationships makes a huge difference in how a child approaches education.

32. I think year 8 and year 10 are the best years in high school/secondary school. Or at least they were when I was there and had to do SATs.

33. No shit. You change schools, get thrown into a whole new environment where you go from top dog to runt, you probably get separated from your friends, and there’s a new level of academic and social pressure. Why wouldn’t you enjoy it less?

    I remember the deputy headmaster visiting our junior school to introduce us to his senior school we’d move to after summer. His message was simple: You think you’re something here but next year you’ll be bottom of the food chain, so keep your heads down and behave because your studies will determine your whole future!

    No pressure then.

34. I don’t know if this is ancedotal, but in primary school we had a single teacher for all subjects in reception, years 1&2, 3&4, and 5&6, meaning you had a connection with your teacher.

    In secondary school, we had 1-2 per subject, sometimes changing each year, and if I remember right, there were 13 subjects. You also had to move between classes and follow a strict schedule.

    Students also varied on the class in secondary, especially when you consider form activities; in primary you always had the same group. Not all your friends will move to the same secondary either, and with those that do, there’s a chance you won’t be in the same class.

    I think it’s just a different structure and experience that you are forced to adapt to, plus higher standards are forced on teenagers. Teachers are probably more stressed out as well.

Comments are closed.