Local Health and wellbeing data

Having access to good quality health and wellbeing data will ensure your new Health Schools work goes smoothly.  It will also give you a good idea of what particualr area (bullying, healthy eating etc) to focus on.  By carrying out a needs analysis at the beginning and end of your work you will be able to measure the impact of what you’re doing.

Your school will hold a variety of quantitaive and qualitative data that is relevant to this work including:

• Examples of quantitative data include attendance figures and data about fixed-term exclusions, take-up of school lunches, travel to school, and behaviour, bullying and racist incidents.
• Examples of qualitative data include children and youn people’s perceptions and self-reported behaviour from surveys, focus groups and interviews.

In Sunderland there are two free large scale Health and Wellbeing surveys that your school could use to support your work; these are the Health Behaviour Survey and ECM Perceptions.

Health Related Behaviour Survey (HRBS) has been carried out every two years with Sunderland school children for the past 10 years by a company called SHEU.  Usually it surveys children from Years 4, 6, 8, 10 and is available to Primary, Secondary and Special schools.  Here is a copy of the 2012 Sunderland Results which you might find useful to compare to your own school results.

ECM Perceptions is carried out by a company called INTEC.  While HRBS can be conducted by paper or online, ECM Perceptions is solely an online survey.  It’s also open to pupils of any year group.  It differs from HRBS in that parents can complete the questionnaire.

Both companies analyse the data when your school has finished the survey and provide you with a detailed report of the findings.  As lots of other schools also complete these surveys you have local and national averages which you can compare.

You can always devise your own questionnaire if the above examples don’t meet your needs.  Some example questionnaires have been added to the resources section of the site to help you with this.