A survey of young people covering health, wellbeing, school life and social media is set to open in October — and for the first time it will ask them about the tools they use every day.
What is being asked
Statistics Jersey said the survey will be offered to students from Year 4 to Year 12 and will run from 5 to 16 October. The 2026 Children and Young People's Survey is voluntary, anonymous and can be completed online.
Officials said it would be the first time the survey asked participants about social media apps and generative AI tools, including how often they use them. It will also explore whether young people have caring responsibilities and enough food for each day.
Chief statistician Ian Cope said it provided a "vital insight" into the lives of children and young people on the island, and that the results would be used across government to inform policy and improve services.
"We have worked directly with students this year to help shape the content, ensuring it reflects the issues that matter most to them," Cope added. "New questions on social media, generative AI, caring responsibilities and food security will help build a more complete picture of the opportunities and challenges facing young people today."
Why the method is the story
Jersey has a population smaller than a single Dhaka ward, so the survey itself is not the point. Three design choices in it are.
It is anonymous and voluntary, which is what makes honest answers possible on questions like food security — a child will not tell a named form that there is not enough to eat at home. It asks about caring responsibilities, which is how young carers become visible at all; they are otherwise recorded only as pupils with poor attendance. And the questions were shaped with the students, which is the difference between measuring what adults assume matters and measuring what does.
What it means in Bangladesh
Bangladesh collects a great deal of data about children — enrolment, dropout, immunisation, stunting, child marriage — and almost none of it comes from asking the children themselves. What exists is mostly reported by schools or by parents, which reliably misses everything a school or a parent has an interest in not reporting.
The gaps are specific and consequential. There is no routine national measure of adolescent mental health, of bullying, of corporal punishment as experienced rather than as policy, of screen and social media use, or of how children are actually using AI tools in their schoolwork — which is now happening at scale in every urban secondary school in the country while no institution has measured it.
The food security question is the one that would matter most here. Child undernutrition in Bangladesh is measured anthropometrically — height and weight — which captures the consequence years after the cause. Asking a fourteen-year-old whether they had enough to eat yesterday captures it now, and at a cost of essentially nothing once a survey exists.
None of this requires new money. Bangladesh already runs national school censuses and has the infrastructure to reach nearly every secondary student. What Jersey demonstrates is that adding four honest questions to an existing instrument — and letting students help write them — produces information no administrative record can.
The one caution is the one Jersey got right: on questions like hunger, care work and mental health, anonymity is not a courtesy. It is the difference between data and a wish list. We looked at the sleep end of the same age group's health in advice for new students.
