The 2025 Wellbeing Census for Birmingham Schools
‘Emotional or Mental wellbeing’ describes a way of looking at mental health from a non-psychiatric strengths-focused perspective and is endorsed in the World Health Organisation definition of mental health as ‘..not simply the absence of mental illness, but the fostering of wellbeing to enable thriving individuals and populations’ (WHO, 2022). Mental wellbeing may thus better represent emotional health status beyond more narrow thresholds defined by mental disorders (Thapar, Stewart-Brown, & Harold, 2021).
A large-scale mental wellbeing census was conducted in Birmingham schools during the summer term of 2023 capturing data from 12,592 pupils between the ages of 8-18 years across 55 schools (33 Primary Schools and 22 Secondary Schools). Pupils completed the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales (WEMWEBS) (Tennant et al., 2007) in secondary schools and the Stirling Children’s Wellbeing Scale (SCWBS) (Liddle & Carter, 2015) in primary schools. Higher scores on both measures indicate better mental wellbeing – both are validated and reliable instruments.
Please click on the links in the accordion menu to find out more
How did schools carry out the census?
Schools carried out the census using a the custom made data collection portal from our sister website www.breathe-schools.co.uk. This software makes administration aspects of the wellbeing census easy for schools to manage as well as allowing for pupil tracking for subsequent wellbeing census. We also worked with schools DPOs and the local education authority to make sure aspects of GDPR, Information Governance and data security were covered.
Our approach also allows us to give schools access to their individual data whilst keeping them anonymous in the overall assessment of wellbeing.
What did the census find out?
Each school that took part will receive a school wellbeing report via their breathe-schools.co.uk dashboard (coming soon). Headline findings are presented below and show a considerable drop in wellbeing for primary schools compared to last years census. Secondary schools were slightly down from last year, and considerably down compared 2020. Variability in wellbeing was observed between schools (please view the lay summaries for more comprehensive information here).
We can now build on and use this metric to track wellbeing across the city and try and direct resources to young people that are scoring below our region’s average score.
This is where www.breathe-edu.co.uk comes in because at Breathe we believe that identifying need and finding solutions to those needs are key to supporting good mental health, in all of us!
So what happens next?
We will look to start planning the next wellbeing census for Early 2023 and think about our experiences from 2022 to try and improve and streamline the admin side of the census where we can hopefully to making it even easier for schools to use. Schools will start receiving their dashboards over the next few weeks.
We’ll be contacting schools in the coming months about the next census this but if you have any questions or want to register your interest early please use the registration form above.
We are really looking forward to continuing to work with Birmingham schools in 2023!
How to interpret your report
If you are a school that took part in the 2022 wellbeing census you soon have access to your individual dashboards. Please also check out the lay summaries (for primary and secondaries) in the attachments below that discuss the findings in the wider context and hopefully in an accessible way. All schools will remain anonymous with only overall findings reported. This way we can try and build a better picture of wellbeing in Birmingham which can then inform how we go about trying to improve things and share best practice. With this in mind, be sure to take a look at the rest of www.breathe-edu.co.uk as we hope over time this will be evolving alongside the data we collect to help schools promote wellbeing and good mental health in the classroom (and for teachers!).
You can also see where your school (available via your dashboard) fell in the overall ranking of all schools by comparing your score with other schools that took part, presented in the tables below (printable pdfs of the tables below can be found in the documents list at the bottom of this page)
