Lego Foundation invests 100 million kroner in child wellbeing research

The Lego Foundation will invest 100 million kroner in a seven-year partnership to study children’s wellbeing and learning, DR reports. The research will be led by Vive, Denmark’s National Research and Analysis Centre for Welfare.

The project aims to build knowledge about why many children and young people in Denmark are struggling and missing school, and why Danish pupils’ results in reading, mathematics and science have declined. The findings are intended to help policymakers and professionals.

“We can see from the latest PISA survey that there are challenges in public schools, and it is hard to open a newspaper today without reading about children’s lack of wellbeing,” said Sidsel Marie Kristensen, chief executive of the Lego Foundation.

Kristensen said the foundation wants the partnership to create a connected body of knowledge and track developments over time. Although the foundation is funding the project, Vive is responsible for the research.

Both partners say they want the results to be useful beyond academic research papers. Vive project development director Hanne Søndergård Pedersen said the research should be relevant to practitioners and decision-makers, and presented in a way they can use.

At the end of the seven-year project, Pedersen hopes there will be a better collective understanding of how to define wellbeing, how it is changing and what affects it. Kristensen said she hopes children will be doing better and that future PISA results will show they are learning and developing more effectively.