Pupil Experience Report 2026

What more than 250,000 pupils across England told us about happiness, safety, learning and being seen in the classroom.

The Pupil Experience Report 2026 is available to download now. It’s our largest pupil dataset yet, with 251,847 pupils from Year 3 to Year 13 across 759 schools and 142 trusts, surveyed during the 2025/26 academic year.

With every mainstream school due to publish an inclusion strategy by 31 December, the report gives you a national baseline of what pupils say, before the new curriculum arrives in 2028.

Key findings:

• Secondary pupils report a better year on most measures. Happiness at school rose from 44% to 51%, wellbeing from 40% to 46%, and feeling safe in class from 63% to 68%.
• More secondary pupils say their teachers explain work clearly, up from 48% to 55%.
• Only 16% of secondary pupils often learn about people like themselves in class, the lowest score on any of the main questions and unchanged for two years.
• Around half of pupils in Years 6 and 7 feel their opinion is valued at school, falling to 26% by Year 11.
• Year 13 pupils are among the happiest in secondary school (65%) but report the lowest wellbeing of any secondary year group (38%).

Use it to

• Set priorities for school improvement, with national evidence behind them
• Inform your inclusion strategy with a national picture of what pupils say
• See where pupil experience dips as children move through school, so you know where to look first
• Compare primary and secondary settings to see where support is most needed