Asthma does not affect children’s performances in exams, according to a major study of more than 12,000 pupils. The research set out to test if childhood asthma is linked to poor academic achievement but instead discovered that youngsters with the chronic lung condition did as well as or slightly better as those without asthma in national school examinations.
What the team’s work did reveal is that ethnicity and social deprivation are more likely to be associated with poorer educational outcomes than asthma.
The study is one of the first to link health, house, benefits and educational data. It was funded by Asthma UK and carried out by a team from Queen Mary University of London, University of Edinburgh and City University. The results were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
The research was focused on more than 12,000 children at 97 schools across the London borough of Tower Hamlets, the third most deprived borough in the UK. Asthma is the most common long-term medical problem for children in the UK, affecting 1.1 million children, and instances of asthma are particularly high in deprived and multi-ethnic communities.
Each child’s exam results were analysed along with data that covered housing, clinical and benefits to measure the effects of ethnicity, social adversity and asthma on educational attainment. The findings showed that social adversity, mental health problems and special educational needs were more likely to be associated with poor exam results than asthma, while Bangladeshi children were shown to have worse results than white children.
The study concluded that social deprivation and ethnicity have more of a detrimental effect on educational attainment than asthma.
Asthma UK now wants further research into asthma and its effects on exam performance, particularly where children have more severe forms of the condition.