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Student difficulties identified by teachers
Teachers were asked to indicate the proportion of their students they believed were experiencing specific difficulties. The response choices were percentage brackets: ‘0%–20%’, ’21%–40%’, ’41%–60%’, ‘61%–80%’, and ’81%–100%’. Percentage brackets were used so that teachers could more easily report how many students were experiencing difficulties, but they are broad groups. All responses in these percentage brackets were combined and used to calculate averages that could show more detail than, for example, ‘0–20%’.
These average proportions of students that teachers considered were showing signs of these difficulties by grade level are shown in Table TT2.5.
The most common difficulty identified by teachers for both grade levels was difficulty focusing attention and concentrating (grade five, 35%; grade seven, 47%). On average, teachers reported about one out of three grade five students, and nearly half of yea six students experienced this difficulty.
Teachers also reported that, on average, more than three out of ten of their students demonstrated a lack of basic knowledge and skills (grade five, 31%; grade seven, 37%), behavioural issues (grade five, 31%; grade seven, 44%), or reading impaired such as dyslexia (grade five, 32%; grade seven, 34%).
The least reported difficulties were related to well-being – hunger and lack of sleep – with between 21% and 24% of students showing signs of these issues across both grade levels.
