Are school-level factors associated with primary school students' experience of physical violence from school staff in Uganda?

Abstract

Background: The nature and structure of the school environment has the potential to shape children's health and well being. Few studies have explored the importance of school-level factors in explaining a child's likelihood of experiencing violence from school staff, particularly in low-resource settings such as Uganda. Methods: To quantify to what extent a student's risk of violence is determined by school-level factors we fitted multilevel logistic regression models to investigate associations and present between-school variance partition coefficients. School structural factors, academic and supportive environment are explored. Results: 53%of students reported physical violence fromstaff. Only 6%of variation in students' experience of violencewas due to differences between schools and half the variationwas explained by the school-level factorsmodelled. Schools with a higher proportion of girls are associated with increased odds of physical violence from staff. Students in schools with a high level of student perceptions of school connectedness have a 36% reduced odds of experiencing physical violence from staff, but no other school-level factor was significantly associated. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that physical violence by school staff is widespread across different types of schools in this setting, but interventions that improve students' school connectedness should be considered.