Students call national well-being survey questions ‘crap’

Pupils at Ferslev School in North Jutland have criticised Denmark’s national well-being survey for primary and lower-secondary students, calling its questions unclear, overly general, and difficult to understand.

In a letter to the Ministry of Education co-signed by Aalborg Youth Council and the local pupil council, the students wrote: “These are crap questions.”

Sofie Gade Hansen, a ninth-grader and pupil council chair, said the survey is supposed to be for children but is not child-friendly. “For many of the questions, you need an adult to explain them,” she said.

Sofia Moyzaki Thomsen, a seventh-grader on the pupil council, said the questions miss the mark and fail to capture the reality of students’ daily lives. Examples include “Do you often have a headache?”—which could stem from poor air quality or classroom noise—and “Do you like your teachers?”—which is too broad, since a pupil may have different relationships with different teachers.

“We can’t figure out how people are doing because everyone interprets the questions differently,” Moyzaki Thomsen said.

The pupils argue that vague questions produce answers too unreliable to be useful for improving well-being. They propose a child-friendly survey co-written by students, with visual scales such as smileys, age-specific versions for different grade levels, and clearer handling of non-responses so they do not skew results.

Education Minister Magnus Heunicke said he welcomes the feedback. “I want to praise the pupils for speaking up when something in their schooling misses the mark. I agree the well-being surveys could be better. We will improve them, and in that work we will of course involve pupils and others who know the subject,” he said in a written response.

Moyzaki Thomsen said she hopes changes will be made in time to affect her own schooling. “I hope something will change, but I don’t know if they’ll manage it,” she said.