The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) released a report on “Aspects of Student wellbeing and reading Achievement in PIRLS 2021”. The report presents the relationship between the student’s reading achievement and some indicators from the data collected through the PIRLS 2021 Learner questionnaire.  These indicators include, firstly, the learner’s sense of school belonging, secondly, Bullying, thirdly, Learners feeling tired or hungry and lastly, Frequency of learner absences. The Bullying scale in the learner questionnaire included ten items which asked learners to rate how often do they experience bullying behaviours at school.

In examining the relationship between student wellbeing and the academic achievement construct, this report, for an example revealed that internationally, learners who never or almost never experience bullying achieved an average mean score of 519, those who reported experiencing bullying about monthly achieved an average mean score of 495, while those who reported experiencing bullying about weekly achieved an average mean score of 451. The similar pattern was also observed in South Africa where the learners who never or almost never experienced bullying achieved a mean score of 359, those who experienced bullying about monthly achieved a mean score of 304, while those who experienced bullying about weekly achieved a mean score of 243.