PRINCIPAL REPORT

From the College Principal

The importance of sleep.

Dear parents and carers,

Much research over recent years has demonstrated the crucial importance getting adequate sleep has on the lives of adults and children. It seems likely that, because young people are growing, the negative effects of insufficient sleep on them may be greater than on adults. Therefore, I am writing to share some information with you which contextualises this problem to our school, and provides you and your children with resources to assist you in establishing (or maintaining) healthy sleep habits. 

Context

The data presented in these graphs is drawn from the annual Youth Resilience Survey which we have been running for a number of years. The larger purple (boys) and green (girls) dots represent our students, and the smaller dotted line represents the average of all schools for boys and girls. Over 480,000 students have been surveyed using this tool, so the national average data is quite robust. 

You can see that, although our data is slightly better than the national average in most areas, the shape of our data shows a consistent fall in the number of our students getting 8 or more hours of sleep a night. There are many studies that show the best performing students are the ones who get 8-9 hours of sleep a night. 

This graph shows the percentage of student who experience disordered sleep. In spite of the up-tick in 2021, like the first graph, it shows a consistent decline the amount of healthy sleep our students are getting. We know that device use and gaming are significant drivers of disordered sleep.

Whilst I am not presenting these data sets, in themselves, as demonstrating causation between sleep and impacts on learning, many studies have demonstrated this. However, the correlation between this graph, which shows a consistent decline in our students’ ability to concentrate at school, and those above is pretty stark. 

What this tells us is that lack of healthy sleep habits is one of the single biggest things impacting student wellbeing and learning growth, and points us to the actions we can take to address these negative effects.

Beyond impacts on learning, poor sleep is also linked to increased prevalence of depression and other mood disorders, obesity, lower energy levels, and impaired cognitive functioning. 

I encourage you to view the videos on our SchoolTV page which explores this topic further. They can be accessed by using this link:

https://brightonsc.vic.schooltv.me/newsletter/sleep

The second video, “Why is sleep so important?” provides a particularly good summary of the topic. Each video only runs for about 5 minutes and suitable for viewing with your children. 

I encourage you to address this important topic with your children, and to try to come up with ways of allowing them to get the sleep they need to thrive in life and at school.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Minack

Principal