The relationship between school environments and health outcomes in young people
This PhD study is being led by Saoirse Moriarty (UCL), supervised by Rebecca Lacey (City St Georges University of London), Yvonne Kelly, Baowen Xue, Katie Harron and Gergo Baranyi (UCL) and was funded by the ESRC as part of the Equalise Centre for Lifecourse Health Equity. The study started in 2025 and aims to finish in 2029.
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We want to know whether air pollution, greenness and heat around schools affect children's health, and which children are most exposed.
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Children spend a large proportion of their waking hours at school. However, little is known about how exposures in the school neighbourhood impact children’s health.
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We will use linked school and hospital records in ECHILD, together with measures of air pollution, greenness and heat around every state-funded school in England, to describe how exposure varies across different groups and over time (2004–2024). We will explore whether exposures are related to children’s health outcomes.
Find out more
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Why does this matter?
Air pollution, heat and greenspace affect children’s health, but we need more research on their impact around schools.
What do we want to find out?
We want to know the effect of school environments on children’s health outcomes.
What we will do
We will look at environmental factors around schools and link these to children’s health records between 2004 and 2024.
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Background/aims:
Air pollution, heat and a lack of greenspace is linked to negative health outcomes, particularly among children. However, existing research often focuses on home environments despite children spending a significant proportion of their waking hours at school. This study addresses these gaps by investigating the impact of school environments on children’s health outcomes and the impact of potential interventions that could mitigate adverse effects.
Methods and analysis:
Using a retrospective cohort design, we will examine whether the environment around schools is associated with children's health. Measures of air pollution (PM2.5), greenness (NDVI) and heat (daily maximum air temperature) will be derived for every state-funded school in England, and linked to student’s records in ECHILD, so that each child is assigned the exposures of the school they attend. Health outcomes come from linked hospital records, focusing on respiratory conditions such as emergency admissions for asthma, and on mental health.
We will then evaluate the School Streets programme, which restricts traffic outside schools at drop-off and pick-up, as a natural experiment. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits the staggered roll-out of schemes, we will compare changes in health outcomes among children attending schools that adopted a scheme with those attending comparable schools that did not.
ECHILD data used:
HES: HES admitted patient care (1997-2023), HES accident and emergency (2007-2020), HES emergency care data set (2017-2023), HES Outpatients (2003-2023), Mental health services data set (2016-2022), Mental health minimum dataset (2006-2014), Mental health and learning disabilities dataset (2014-2016), NPD Autumn Census (2006-2022)
NPD Autumn Census will be used for school identifiers (URN) and pupil level covariates including FSM eligibility and IDACI rank.
The study will focus on children born between 2002 and 2007, followed through to Year 13 for earlier cohorts and Year 11 at minimum for later cohorts, depending on data availability.
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