Polish children moderately happy

Children in Poland are in the middle of the scale in terms of school satisfaction, a new study finds, with children in the UK among the unhappiest.

In terms of mean satisfaction, Polish children rated their school experience at 8.6 and 8.0 (on a scale of ten) for 10 year-old and 12 year-olds respectively. This puts the country’s students in a similar situation as those in Spain and South Africa, a new report by the UK-based Children’s Society said.

Polish boys rated the satisfaction with their body at 8.7, while girls rated theirs at 8.1. Children in Columbia were the most satisfied among those surveyed with 9.4 and 9.6 respectively.

Children’s Society said that “Children in England are unhappier with their school life than those in almost every country featured.”

However, these statistics need to be taken with a pinch of salt, the Society said. “Though it is easy to slip into a shorthand of happiness, well-being is about so much more than this. It is about how young people feel about their lives as a whole, how they feel about their relationships, the amount of choice that they have in their lives, and their future. Well-being matters as an end in itself, but also because it is correlated with other outcomes in life such as physical and mental health.”

The international research is based on a survey of 53,000 children aged 10 and 12 in the following countries: England, Germany, Norway, South Korea, Poland, Estonia, Spain, Turkey, Romania, Algeria, South Africa, Israel, Ethiopia, Colombia and Nepal.