In May this year, Essity published a report titled ‘Bottom of the Class’ that presents strong evidence to suggest that a combination of poor toilet facilties and poor hygiene habits among children in primary schools are having an negative impact on pupils’ education, health and wellbeing.
Those findings are based on a series of interviews conducted earlier in the year by YouGov which involved 400 teachers and 500 parents and children. When putting the report together, we saw three key issues emerge – that hygiene levels in primary schools are poor; that children aren’t learning essential hygiene habits early enough; and that children are actively avoiding using toilets at school, with the result that they develop unhealthy behaviours from an early age.
The findings further indicate that the amount of time spent by teachers on cleaning children who are unable to clean themselves, or even cleaning school toilets after children have used them, is quite staggering. We’ve calculated that staff are spending over a million hours per year on doing that, equating to around £11 million in labour costs.
Quite often the interviewees would talk of primary toilets lacking toilet roll and soap – in some instances, teachers were even buying soap personally and bringing it in themselves. It would seem that the general standard of many primary school washrooms is putting children off going into them, which is in turn having big knock-on effects. We found that just over 10% of the pupils interviewed avoided using them each day, while around 40% of primary school teachers told us that children known to avoid visting the toilet at school were unable to properly concentate in class. That loss of learning isn’t even the whole story, with children who ‘hold on’ in this way obviously running the risk of wetting or soiling themselves, or even developing long-term bladder and bowel issues.
We’re now embarking on the next phase of what we’re calling the School Hygiene Essentials Initiative, which will see us organise discussions with schools, LAs and other educational organisations and reach a collective understanding of what will improve the hygiene of primary school toilets so that we can look at possible solutions. We’re well aware that school budgets are maxed out for many, so we don’t see it is a case of simply throwing money at this issue. It’s perhaps more about trying to find an educational approach to resolving the problem.
Once we’ve completed those next steps we’ll look to implement some pilots over a six-month period with a number of schools across the UK, measure the (hopefully positive) impact of any proposed solutions and then move forward from there. The aim is to take solutions to government and other interested parties, with a view to potentially rolling out new national standards to primary schools across the country.
Kevin Starr is the managing director of Essity – a producer of hygiene and health products under a number of brands, including Cushelle, Tempo and Lotus
