The impacts of environmental noise on the academic achievements of secondary school students in Greater London

Previous studies on the detrimental impact of chronic external noise upon the academic performance of school children were normally based on sampled school sites, and the results were often limited to a specific range of areas. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationships between environmental noise levels of secondary schools in Greater London and a set of academic achievement factors, and also, to determine the noise exposure of secondary schools. Four academic achievement indicators were considered and five noise indicators were obtained after processing noise map data. It has been shown that the environmental noise levels of secondary schools in Greater London have almost no significant relationships with those academic achievement indicators. As expected, the secondary schools in Inner London are noisier than those in Outer London. The average difference is calculated as 2 dBA. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.