Supporting Every Learner: How the CENTURY Wellbeing Tool Helps Schools Understand Their Students

In busy schools, it’s easy for subtle changes in a student’s wellbeing to go unnoticed. Yet how a young person feels about their educational setting, learning and their place in the community can have a huge impact on their attendance, behaviour, and academic achievement. The difficulty for teachers and leaders is that wellbeing isn’t as easy to measure as academic achievement or attendance, and many existing tools focus on identifying mental health risks, rather than building a clear picture of positive, school-specific wellbeing.

The Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire (SSWQ) was created to fill that gap. Developed by Dr. Tyler Renshaw at Utah State University, the SSWQ is a 16-item self-report questionnaire designed to measure how students feel about their school experience across four key domains: school connectedness, academic efficacy, joy of learning, and educational purpose. “The SSWQ has been used as a schoolwide well‑being screener to monitor or evaluate schoolwide social‑emotional learning or well‑being programme/intervention planning” (Renshaw, 2025).

In the UK context, the importance of such a tool is clear. Nearly one in five children aged 7–16 have a probable mental disorder, according to NHS Digital’s 2023 data, and almost half of secondary school teachers report an increase in anxiety among pupils in the past year (Teacher Wellbeing Index, 2024). Pupils with low wellbeing are three times more likely to have poor attendance, according to the Department for Education, and over half of FE students say stress and mental health difficulties affect their ability to learn (Association of Colleges, 2023). These statistics highlight the need for regular, structured monitoring so that concerns can be identified early and addressed in a supportive, proactive way.

In their original research, Renshaw et al., (2015) show that SSWQ scores correlate strongly with positive student behaviours such as academic perseverance and getting along with others. In other words, higher wellbeing scores are linked to the attitudes and behaviours every school wants to see flourish: motivation, resilience, cooperation, and a sense of belonging. Their research has been thoroughly tested and shown to be both reliable and clear in its structure, performing consistently and equally well with all genders, ensuring fairness and strong insights from every student.

At CENTURY, we have transformed the SSWQ into a simple, accessible digital tool designed for primary, secondary, and post-16 learners. Students complete the survey online in under five minutes, answering straightforward, positively framed statements using a four-point scale. Their responses are automatically analysed and displayed in an intuitive, confidential report that breaks down results by the four key wellbeing domains, and includes an additional ‘safety’ section which provides crucial data for identifying students that may require immediate intervention. The platform makes it easy to see where a student, class, or year group is thriving, where extra support or intervention may be needed and how the wellbeing of individuals and groups have changed over time. Teachers and school leaders can compare cohorts and track changes term by term, making the data highly valuable in everyday work.

The value of the tool lies in turning the student voice into actionable insight. For teachers and leaders, it provides valuable insights into how students feel about their school experience, revealing themes that are crucial to understanding engagement, behaviour and academic achievement. For leaders, it offers clear, termly data to inform pastoral priorities and evidence provision for personal development in line with the Ofsted framework. In FE settings, it provides data to support retention, engagement and understand the experience of learners who are undergoing key transitions between courses or into employment.

By providing a clear, research-backed picture of how students feel about their place of learning, the CENTURY Wellbeing tool helps schools and colleges not only identify needs, but also celebrate strengths and track the impact of their pastoral care over time. It is a practical, time-efficient way to make sure every learner’s voice is heard and that no student’s wellbeing is left to chance.

Learn more about the CENTURY Wellbeing Tool for students Year 4 and up here, and for post-16 learners here.

Reference List
Association of Colleges. (2023). Student Mental Health and Wellbeing Survey. Association of Colleges. Retrieved from https://www.aoc.co.uk/student-mental-health-wellbeing-survey

Education Support. (2024). Teacher Wellbeing Index 2024. Education Support Partnership. Retrieved from https://www.educationsupport.org.uk/resources/teacher-wellbeing-index

NHS Digital. (2023). Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2023. NHS England. Retrieved from https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-people-in-england

Renshaw, T. L. (2025) User Guide for the SSWQ. Tyler Renshaw, PhD website. Available at: https://www.tyrenshaw.org/p/sswq (Accessed: 18 August 2025)

Renshaw, T. L., Long, A. C. J., & Cook, C. R. (2015). Assessing adolescents’ positive psychological functioning at school: Development and validation of the Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire. School Psychology Quarterly, 30(4), 534–552. doi:10.1037/spq0000088