Surrey Homes | SH65 | March 2020 | Good Living supplement inside

Education
Fresh Thinking
Hilary Wilce looks at the impact of
environment on learning outcomes
March winds and April showers bring forth May
flowers, the old rhyme tells us. But according
to many teachers March winds bring forth
something altogether less welcome – classrooms full of
excited, wild-eyed children who find it hard to settle
down and concentrate. “You’re definitely scraping them
off the ceiling when it’s windy outside,” one teacher says.
There’s actually little hard evidence for this, but since
animals are known to respond to atmospheric pressure,
and psychiatric hospitals report increased admissions
ahead of storms and winds, it would be surprising if
children didn’t react to the weather around them.
And we know for a fact that hot summers take their
toll. Students grow lethargic and irritable
as temperatures rise, and they learn
significantly less well. When researchers
working for the US’s National Bureau
of Economic Research matched the test
scores of 10 million high school pupils
with weather records they found that
learning dropped on average by 1% for every one degree
temperature rise the year before an exam. The effect
was particularly noticeable for pupils in deprived areas
where schools were less likely to be air-conditioned.
In this country, new school buildings are adapted
for heatwaves, but old ones are a nightmare for pupils
and teachers. Teachers say they can just about get
students through morning lessons but by the afternoon,
everyone is dehydrated, overheated and headachy. And
studies have shown that very hot weather affects us all,
decreasing our ability to make decisions or cope with
new information, as well as keeping us indoors and away
from outdoor exercise – all things which impact directly
on children’s ability to do their best in the classroom.
Alas, cold weather is not much better. Classrooms
have, by law, to reach 18 degrees Celsius to be
usable and when schools fear that their buildings
will be too cold or that school travel will be
dangerous, they close. Bad winters can see multiple
school closures, with added school absences for
less well-off children who don’t have good warm
clothes, or a parent’s car to get them to school.
All of which means that the more extreme
climate swings we are seeing now will bring new
challenges for parents, teachers and children.
Meanwhile, a recent study has added significantly
“Noise directly
impacts how
well children
learn to read”
to the existing evidence that air pollution impacts
children’s learning. When 18 schools in Los Angeles
began to filter their air following a natural gas leak,
researchers were astonished to see that test scores
leapt up. The effect of air filters was, they estimated,
the equivalent of students getting two and a half
months of extra learning before taking their tests.
Already many UK schools are trying to
keep their air clean by planting screens of ivy
around their playgrounds, and telling parents
to turn off car engines at the school gate.
But all sorts of environmental factors can affect school
performance. Noise directly impacts how well children
learn to read and acquire language – so
pity the children whose schools are near
major airports – while exposure to lead,
mercury and other metals damages
children’s brains and nervous systems.
Of course, we’re so lucky here in
The Weald where lots of schools enjoy
quiet settings, where our many woods and hedgerows
filter the air, and where most of us live very far away
from the worst ravages of industrial pollution.
But we still need to remember that children are
not little human robots, easily programmed for test
success. They are living, breathing human animals,
affected by every aspect of their environment,
whose ability to learn may sometimes be greatly
challenged by the world around them.
121 surrey-homes.co.uk