A positive school climate is one of those things that is difficult to define and measure, but everyone – including parents – recognises it when they see it. The state of the school’s facilities, the tone of the conversations in corridors, the enthusiasm of the school staff and the way students interact during breaks are some of the signs that visitors can read to quickly and broadly assess a school’s climate. PISA indicators of school climate – the disciplinary climate, students’ sense of belonging at school and teacher support – can be analysed in relation to other PISA data on important student outcomes, such as academic achievement, student misbehaviour and students’ well-being, and to key factors that shape students’ learning, such as teachers’ practices and parental involvement.
Measuring the well-being of 15-year-old students, the target PISA population, is particularly important, as students at this age are in a key transition phase of physical and emotional development. Asking students about themselves gives adolescents the opportunity to express how they feel, what they think of their lives and whether they believe they have the capacity to grow and improve. Even if the well-being indicators examined in this volume do not refer specifically to the school context – for instance, students are asked how satisfied they feel about their lives in general – adolescents spend a large part of their time at school and their peers play a pre-eminent role in their social lives. In fact, students who sat the 2018 PISA test cited three main aspects of their lives that influence how they feel: how satisfied they are with the way they look, with their relationships with their parents, and with life at school.
