Secondary school children’s health and well-being dashboard

Good afternoon, everybody and welcome. This is our third secondary school children’s health and wellbeing dashboard webinar. Now it’s really great to see so many people joining us today, so welcome back to those who’ve joined us before and to those who are new. It’s great to have you here this afternoon.

It’s really brilliant to see the dashboard is of interest to so many people. We’ve got 43 people watching so far and a few more still to come, I think. So really good.

So, I’ll quickly introduce myself. My name is Zoe Strawbridge and I’m an analyst for Public Health Wales alongside Zac Watkinson who’s presenting here with me today, Matt Jones, Jackie Green, and Louise Steans who are also all on the call as well, and we’ve actually spent the last few months working on the update for the SHRN dashboard which has been published today.

So as mentioned, we have done webinars before, and they’ve given an intro into what SHRN is and the background to the dashboard creation. So, to avoid duplication we’re just going to be skipping over this part and going straight into what we’ve actually added this time around in our update.

Now, if you’re new here and you did want some background info into what the dashboard is and how it came about, we do have a recording of our previous webinar available and that is on our website, so you can watch that back at your own leisure.

Speaking of recordings, we will be recording this session for anybody unable to make today and this will be shared via email as well as being available on our website as well with the other webinar. So yeah, if anyone’s unable to make it today, you can watch that back.

And that’s it in terms of the admin bit. So just briefly to cover what this webinar is going to be covering today: we’re going to do a little bit on the data updates and a summary of what we’ve found so far, we’re going to talk about the innovations and changes we’ve made in the dashboard that have been pushed by you, the users. We’re then going to do a very brief demo of those changes and a brief look to the future as to what we want to actually implement next time we do an update.

We do have space for questions in the chat bar or potentially in the Q&A section as well at the top of the Teams channel here. So, feel free to add your queries throughout the presentation today and we will try and respond to them throughout. But we will have about 10 minutes at the end of this session to answer questions too. So if you’d prefer to discuss your question, that’s also fine — just wait till the end and we can come to you for that.

So, joining us for that Q&A session we have Lianna and Edna from SHRN, and we’ve also got Lorna from the Welsh Network of Health and Well‑being Promoting Schools, and they are going to be here to help us answer questions around the survey itself and implementation within schools as well.

So, moving on to data updates then. For this publication we’ve added 30 new variables for the most recent survey, which is the 2023 survey.

And just really briefly overviewing what we’ve added in — not going to list all 30 — but we’ve added, in the mental health and well‑being topic, things around problematic social media use and loneliness in the summer holidays. We’ve added quite a few variables for the substance use and gambling topic including data on e‑cigarettes and vaping such as having tried them, weekly use, and daily use, and also some “age first” variables, so age first got drunk, age first tried drugs, that sort of stuff, and also data on gambling.

We’ve added in extra contraception questions such as emergency contraception use and long‑acting reversible contraception. We’ve also added quite a few topics in the school life section such as being taken seriously and trusting teachers. And then finally we’ve added a new topic grouping called general health, which has things around feeling low, nervousness, and sleeping issues.

So that’s just a very brief overview. Do feel free to have a look at the website yourself and have a little play around. On our landing page — at the link I sent in the chat — we’ve added some summary messages. And I think Zac’s going to show that screen now.

So we’ve got some summary messages here which are interesting trends that we’ve spotted in the data. Now obviously these summary messages are really high‑level. Please do feel free to look in the dashboard yourself and get a feel for the data. This is very much just us looking at it from a very basic level in terms of these summary messages.

The first one we found was around problematic social media use. This data has come from a bunch of questions around whether students have tried to limit their social media use and been unable to, whether it’s all they can think about, whether they’ve neglected other activities to be on social media, or whether it’s caused major conflict within family and friends.

So it’s quite a well‑rounded question and it’s based off sites such as Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram — a real variety. The data shows us that 10% of all boys in Wales and 18% of all girls in Wales in 2023 are classified as problematic users of social media. So it’s quite a high number really.

We found that girls from low and middle affluence households are more likely to be classified as problematic users than those from a high‑affluence household. We also found that over one in five girls in Years 9 and 10 were classified as problematic users — which is double that of boys from the same year groups in 2023. So these are quite shocking numbers.

We’ve seen a lot about this topic in the media recently, so it’s really good to get data on this and see that potentially girls are more impacted by problematic social media use than boys. It’s really useful to get that data.

And linking to this problematic social media use, we’ve also added summary messages around emotional health. We see that more than half of girls in Wales reported experiencing feelings of low mood, irritability, nervousness, or trouble getting to sleep, while only about a third of boys reported the same issues. It’s not brilliant news — we don’t know the reasoning behind this. This data doesn’t give us that level of information. But we do know that emotional health changes quite a bit in adolescence, from what we see around us and what we’ve lived through ourselves. But it is useful to quantify those differences between genders using this data.

On a different topic, we’ve also included 2023 data for e‑cigarettes and vaping. I use those interchangeably because the survey question also used them interchangeably. There’s a bit more detail about that in the dashboard itself.

We saw a rise in students who had tried vaping: 26% of all students had tried vaping in 2023, up from 20% in 2021. We spotted that over half of Year 11 girls had tried vaping in 2023, which is nearly double the national average in Wales for that year. And of those Year 11 girls, they report the highest weekly and daily use compared to all other year groups and genders — they are the key group who seem to be vaping the most.

And finally, a relatively new topic in the public health sphere: gambling. The data shows that boys are more likely to spend their own money on gambling compared to girls, and boys show increased gambling behaviours with increasing age. We saw that around 19% of boys gamble at age 16 in 2023.

So it’s really interesting data — a wide breadth of information — and this is super brief. Please do feel free to look into the data in your own time.

I’m just going to briefly move into the technical improvements now before we get to Zac’s demo.

So, in this update, we focused on innovation driven by you, the users. We gathered a user group a few months ago and set up an engagement meeting to allow users to tell us exactly what they wanted in the dashboard and what their needs were.

From this feedback, we were able to drive change in the dashboard, and the changes will hopefully result in an improved dashboard experience for everyone.

Very briefly, we’ve tried to make clearer charts, better image downloads for use in presentations, made survey questions really bold and clear, and removed anything unnecessary in the dashboard — trying to make it as smooth as possible for everyone to use.

We had a lot of feedback, which is brilliant, but we’ve only been able to incorporate a selection of improvements in the limited time for this update. Looking to the future, we hope to add other suggested improvements that weren’t included in this release. Zac will cover that shortly.

So without further ado, I’m going to hand over to Zac now to show you exactly what we’ve been up to. Thank you.

Thanks, Zoe. So yeah, just going to do a quick demo and link it to some of the key messages Zoe mentioned earlier.

First, you can see at the top we removed the geography tab after feedback that it wasn’t being used. We’ve also made the tabs for topics and variables clearer.

We also changed “male and female” to “boy and girl” to align with what the SHRN local authority reports used to provide.

So first, we’ll look at the key message on problematic social media use. To look at girls from lower and middle affluence households being more likely to be problematic users than those from higher affluence households, we navigate to Mental Health and Well‑being, then Problematic Social Media Use.

We select gender: girl, then breakdown: family affluence scale. The chart shows the differences clearly. We added labels and made the chart area smaller to bring the axis up so everything is clearer.

The download button is clearer now as well. Downloading the chart takes a screenshot of that section, including any caveats, which you can easily drop into PowerPoint.

The questions are bold in the technical info so you can see them clearly. You can also compare boys and girls by selecting both genders.

Next, e‑cigarettes and vaping. There was a rise from 20% in 2021 to 26% in 2023. To see this, go to Substance Use and Gambling → Tried E‑cigarettes.

There are two ways to view this: the compare chart (bar chart for two years), and the trend chart (all years). On the trend chart, to help see small changes, we’ve added a “shorten axis” button to effectively zoom in. This helps, but should be used cautiously as it can exaggerate differences.

You can download this zoomed version too. You can also filter by health board, add confidence intervals, and see the bold question wording below.

That’s it for the demo — back to slides.

What’s coming next? We’re looking to add ethnicity breakdowns — hopefully for most variables — for 2023 data.

We’re also looking to provide year group and local authority breakdowns. Many users wanted to see year group data at local authority level to help identify differences. We’ll try to add this to as many variables as possible, but it requires further scoping.

Dashboard improvements will continue — both user‑facing and technical. If you have ideas or spot issues, let us know via the Observatory email.

Finally, SHRN has completed the primary survey recently. We’re hoping to develop a primary school dashboard, aiming for release later this year, depending on data availability and team capacity.

Thank you for listening everyone.

Thank you ever so much everybody for joining today. I think we have just about enough people to make a start. We’ve got quite a few things to cover today so we’ll get going. This session is going to be recorded for anybody who wants to view it afterwards. It will be available in a few places and we’ll send it out after this meeting as well.

I just want to give everybody a warm welcome to this short webinar. I’m Zoe Strawbridge, an analyst working in Public Health Wales alongside Zac Watkinson, Matt Jones, Jackielynn Green and Louise Steans. We have been working over the past few months on developing the SHRN dashboard, which has been published today, and you’ll be able to see that at the links we can share in the Q&A section as well.

It’s really great to see that this is of interest to so many people, and really good to get so much interaction with you all. This webinar today is going to cover a bit of background on what SHRN is, and then go straight into a demonstration of how to use the dashboard. We will have space for questions and answers. At the top of the screen there’s a Q&A button where you’re able to post questions you may have, and there are discussion points should you want to add any there. Pop those in throughout the demo; we’ll try to get through them all and make sure we speak about them later on as well, so they’re included on the recording.

We will also have 10 minutes at the end of this session to answer any questions verbally if you prefer that instead of typing them into the Q&A. Totally up to you, but yes, we will have questions at the end.

For the Q&A towards the end, we will have Lianna Angel and Edna Ogard from the SHRN team joining us, and we also have Lorna Bennett from the Welsh Network of Health and Well-being Promoting Schools. They’re going to help us answer questions about the survey itself and the implementation of the survey results within schools.

Next slide please.

So, you may be asking: what is SHRN? SHRN is the School Health Research Network. It is a collaboration within Cardiff University under DECIPHer. The collaboration includes us in Public Health Wales, Cardiff University, and Welsh Government.

Since 2017, every maintained secondary school in Wales has been part of the SHRN network. As part of their work, they’ve developed a health and well‑being survey which is completed every two years by secondary school children in Wales. This survey has been running since 2013.

The coverage for the survey is really high. In 2023, over 90% of schools completed it, covering over 73% of all pupils in maintained secondary schools in Wales. This means the data is incredibly rich and gives lots of insight into secondary school children’s health, well‑being and behaviour.

We in Public Health Wales have been working with SHRN for a few years now and our collaboration has been very successful. Previously, SHRN produced static PDF reports each time new data was published. These are available on their website. They covered very good and wide‑ranging topics, but they took a long time to create and the static format limited users’ ability to extract exactly what they needed.

Last spring, we in Public Health Wales worked with SHRN and developed an interactive online tool — the dashboard — which covered key indicators at local authority level and above (health board level and Wales level).

Following our successful initial publication, we received really good feedback from users and from SHRN. From that, SHRN concluded that the dashboard provided a better way of visualising the data and getting it to people faster. Therefore, for this year, for the first time ever, SHRN will not be publishing a static PDF report. Instead, the dashboard we’re demonstrating today is the standalone product presenting the 2023 survey data.

Using a tool like this allows us to push the data further than ever before. It allows comparison over time from 2017 to 2023. This provides a unique pre‑pandemic baseline to see how health and well‑being were affected by the pandemic, and how adolescents have recovered in the years following.

Next slide please.

In the work we’ve been doing in the past year, there are several updates. The team has been working really hard on improvements and additions to the updated dashboard. The points on the screen show a handful of these changes.

These include:

• Updating all indicators where possible with the most recent 2023 data.
• Including a new mental health question: the SDQ (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire), which Matt will demo later.
• Adding a gender breakdown for students who reported their gender as “neither word describes me.” This is presented at Wales level only due to small numbers.
• Adding the ability to view data by year group as well as age.
• Improving the display of data with new trend charts and easier comparison bar charts.

That’s a brief overview of the updates we’ve created so far. Without further ado, I’m going to hand over to Zac and Matt, who are going to take us through a demonstration of interacting with the dashboard and how you might best use it in your own work.

Over to you, Zac.

Thanks Zoe. I’m just going to start off on our landing page. Here’s the landing page, and we have the big link here to our dashboard — this is where you can go and visualise the data. We also have a complete data download here, so if you want an Excel document to look through the data yourself, it’s available. We also have the response rates and a dashboard user guide for anyone new to the dashboard.

Below, we’ve got the start of our key messages. These are some of the things we’ve spotted while looking through the data.

I’m going to take you through a little demo looking at physical activity and exercise, and we’re going to visualise these in the dashboard.

Here’s the first dashboard homepage. We want to look at physical activity, so in the top green bar we’re going to click on “Physical Activity”. Below that you’ll see the secondary topics and we want “Physical Activity” here.

We want to look at the percentage of children meeting physical activity guidelines. We want to look back to levels seen in 2017 and compare boys and girls. Here’s the 2023 data. To see it from 2017, we click on the “Trend” tab on the left. That gives us a line chart for Wales, but this is all persons and the axes go up to 100, which makes small changes harder to see.

If you want to see the raw data, scroll down and there’s a table with all the years included.

We want to compare males and females, so we select “Male” and “Female”. That shows them next to each other, but again it’s quite flat visually.

You can visualise the short‑term change as well. For example, you can click “Compare 2023 to 2021”, which brings up a bar chart of the changes. You can also look at this for males and females.

Next key message: physical activity tends to decline with age or year group. To look at this, we go back to 2023 data, go to “Persons”, then in “Select Breakdown”, choose “Age”. That creates a chart showing ages 11 to 16, and you can see the decline. The same applies if we click “Year group”. There’s also a Wales line to show the average.

Finally, we want to see how family affluence impacts vigorous exercise outside school time. To do this, we change topic from “Physical Activity” to “Exercise”. Go back to 2023 and select “Family Affluence Scale” under “Breakdown”. That gives us a bar chart showing high, medium and low levels. You can remove categories to isolate high and low.

You can also look at trends over time by clicking “Trend”. We can remove the Wales line to focus on high/medium/low, and we can also look at male and female differences.

You can download any chart as an image using the button below the chart, and then paste it straight into PowerPoint or other documents.

That’s the first part of the demo. I’m going to pass over to Matt for the second part.

Thanks Zac, I’ll just share my screen.

I’m going to go through the dashboard to look at the new Strengths and Difficulties indicators. These can be found in the “Well-being and Emotional Health” topic. We have several SDQ indicators but for this demo we’ll look at the Total SDQ Score.

This indicator measures psychological problems and strengths. A high score indicates poorer mental health. The total score combines four groups of questions: emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, and peer relationship problems. You can see more technical information in the “Technical Info” section beneath the table.

Let’s look at the data. We’ll look at the trend for males and females. Click “Trend”, then select “Male” and “Female”.

There’s an increase from 2019 to 2023 for both groups. Females have a higher score across all years. In the most recent year, 42% of females scored high or very high, compared to 27% of males.

We’ll break this down further by year group. Go to “Select Breakdown” → “Year group”, then select them all.

By breaking it down, we can see that in the most recent year, females in Year 9 and 10 scored the highest.

Now, I want to download the data but only for Years 9 and 10. So I deselect the others and click “Download Data”. This downloads an Excel file with two tabs: technical info and the data itself, containing the filtered years.

That’s it for my demo. I’ll hand over to Jackie.

Thank you Matt. Let me just share my screen.

What can we look forward to following this 2023 update? First, more survey topics are in the works, as well as an update on the drug‑free tab. For the data and topic updates, we are looking to publish new topics in two phases in early 2025.

On the SHRN landing page on the Public Health Wales website, if you scroll to the bottom you’ll see the proposed publication timetable. The new topics include things like e‑cigarette use, smoking, vaping, school involvement, and age of first risky behaviour (e.g., first used drugs, first drank alcohol).

Phase 2, expected around April 2025, includes topics like ethnicity breakdowns for 2023 data, family support, school absenteeism, and school exclusion.

These topics and dates are subject to change based on data availability and capacity.

The geography tab has been omitted for this update, based on feedback that it wasn’t as useful as intended. It is being redeveloped. If anyone used it regularly and has suggestions, please contact us at [email protected].

We also have ongoing small dashboard improvements. Finally, the primary school dashboard is planned for late 2025, subject to data availability.

Thank you very much for listening. I’ll hand over to Louise for the Q&A.

Thank you Jackie. That’s the end of the demo section. I invite you all to post questions in the Q&A or raise your virtual hand.

Q: Can the webinar be shared afterwards?
A: Yes. Please share it widely. The recording will be posted on the webpage.

Q: Will ethnicity breakdowns be included?
A: Yes — planned for next year, likely April, but to be confirmed.

Q: Clarity on the geography tab — will local authority data be accessible?
A: Yes. All geography detail is now contained in the topic view. You can break down any topic by local authority using the breakdown menu.

Q: Will there be dashboards for individual secondary schools?
A (Lianna): Yes, the plan is to roll out school‑level SHRN reporting dashboards for the 2025 data collection, with reporting expected in 2026.

Q: Should charts start at zero given small changes?
A: We appreciate the feedback. There is a zoom function and tooltip values. The axis starts at zero to avoid exaggerating small changes.

Q: When will the primary school dashboard be ready?
A: We hope data will be available sometime in 2025, with the dashboard likely later in 2025 depending on capacity and data availability. SHRN will also produce hard‑copy reports for this round.

That’s the end of the questions. Thanks everyone for joining. We’ll post the webinar recording for anyone unable to attend. Please share the dashboard links with colleagues and anyone interested. We would really welcome any feedback — please email us through the Observatory inbox.

Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your day.