Conference Agenda

This symposium examines the paradoxes that emerge when wellbeing is curriculised and comes to function as an organising educational imperative, shaping policy agendas, institutional practices, and everyday experiences of schooling.

In many educational systems across Europe and beyond, wellbeing has become a central concern of educational policy, positioned simultaneously as a core objective of schooling and as a precondition for academic achievement (OECD, 2017). In parallel, educational research has largely endorsed the transformative potential of wellbeing, emphasising its capacity to support school development conducive to students’ thriving and improved academic outcomes. Consequently, much of the empirical research focuses on evaluating the effects of wellbeing programmes on students’ mental health, engagement, and attainment (e.g. Barry et al., 2017; Daniele et al., 2022).

Despite its significance, wellbeing remains conceptually contested, characterised by semantic breadth, normative ambiguity, and persistent tensions between instrumental and transformative educational purposes (Primdahl & Simovska, 2024). Critical scholarship has questioned the individualistic orientation of much wellbeing research, describing it as part of education’s therapeutic turn (Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009), which risks assuming a tyrannical character (Simovska & Kousholt, 2021), particularly when reduced to simplified ‘feel-good’ agendas or prescriptive emotion norms (Dewar, 2016). Such framings have been shown to contribute to climates of toxic positivity (O’Toole, 2019) and processes of marginalisation (Wood, 2018), especially for students whose experiences do not align with dominant ideals of self-regulation, resilience, or optimism. Paradoxically, an intensified emphasis on wellbeing may undermine the very educational aims it seeks to advance.

Educational policy and research discourse typically construe wellbeing as a condition for academic achievement and performance in national and international comparisons (OECD, 2017). By contrast, our point of departure in this symposium is that the policy specification of wellbeing as a mandatory educational objective fundamentally curriculises wellbeing. Through formalisation, wellbeing is transformed into an object of educational practice (Alhadeff-Jones, 2018): something students are expected to learn, enact, demonstrate, and be accountable for, alongside other curriculum domains. This raises critical questions about what forms of knowledge, subjectivities, and behaviours are legitimised when wellbeing becomes teachable, assessable, and governable.

Rather than accepting the taken-for-granted assumption that the curriculisation of wellbeing necessarily enhances educational quality or student outcomes, we treat this transformation as an open empirical question. Bringing together studies of policy trajectories (Australia), institutional public representations (Denmark and England), and everyday school practices (Denmark), we examine the paradoxes that arise as wellbeing operates as an organizing concept in education. The papers explore how wellbeing agendas are configured and circulated across policy texts, public institutional narratives, and classroom interactions and how these agendas are taken up, negotiated, or resisted by schools and students.

Together, the symposium contributions afford theoretically grounded, multi-level, and cross-national analysis of wellbeing as curriculum. The discussion is organized around three key paradoxes. First, the curriculisation of wellbeing introduces tensions between universalised aspirations and differential effects, as seemingly inclusive wellbeing agendas can produce new forms of exclusion and classification. Second, wellbeing operates as a powerful normative force that reshapes educational subjectivities, often locating responsibility for structural inequalities onto individual students and schools. Third, despite its governing and normalising effects, wellbeing remains a site of negotiation, contestation, and redefinition.

By placing policy analysis, institutional interpretive repertoires, and students lived experience in dialogue, the symposium contributes to ongoing critical debates in European educational research. It invites participants to reflect not whether wellbeing belongs in education, but how it works as an organising concept, for whom, and to what ends.

In contemporary education policy and programs, the concept of wellbeing looms large. In schooling policy material, the relationship between wellbeing, learning, and life success is largely taken for granted, with wellbeing considered something to be developed, improved, and nurtured so that young people might thrive at school and in later life (e.g. OECD 2025; Education Council, 2022). Correspondingly, teaching students how to ‘be well’ has become an accepted if not expected practice, with a raft of wellbeing programs and associated assessment tools circulating as a normative and normalising part of the life of schools (Wright, McLeod & Flenley, 2022). In this paper, we critically consider how ‘being well’ has become something to be taught and assessed in schools; seeing the conceptualisation and deployment of wellbeing as shifting from a counselling or pastoral mode and technology to becoming a question for curriculum and knowledge making. We develop this analysis from the vantage point of a new research study into the shifting agendas of wellbeing in contemporary Australian educational policy. Taking the period 2000 to 2025, this project seeks to analyse why, how, and in what ways wellbeing has moved from being framed more ontologically as a mode of being to an object of and problem for curriculum intervention. It seeks not only to understand wellbeing-as-curriculum but also to explore how wellbeing has in turn, shaped modes and purposes of contemporary curriculum. To advance this argument, the project mobilises Foucault’s (1977/1980) notion of the dispositif. The dispositif has been influential in educational research, capturing complex and contingent intersections between power and knowledge, and used to explain the rise and reach of social concepts (Jones & Ball, 2023). This paper outlines an approach to working with the dispositif involving three analytic moves: apprehending the educational agendas that take hold in certain times and places; appraising the shifting power relations that allow this to happen; and analysing what Foucault calls the strategic function, elaboration, and completions of the agendas—that is, why they arise, how they operate, and what they come to do. Here, we illustrate the possibilities of this approach using early findings from the project. Our aim is twofold: one, we seek to chart aspects of the shifting wellbeing terrain in Australian education policy; and two, we wish to demonstrate the analytic possibilities of the dispositif as a method.

Educational Council (2022) Australian Student Wellbeing Framework. Education Services Australia. Foucault M (1977/1980) The confession of the flesh. In C Gordon (Ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings by Michel Foucault 1972—1977. Pantheon Books, pp. 194–228. Jones, B. M. A., & Ball, S. J. (2023). The neoliberal dispositif: understanding the transformation of the social and ethical space of education. International Encyclopedia of Education: Fourth Edition, 60–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.01009-5 OECD (2025), Education Policy Outlook 2025: Nurturing Engaged and Resilient Lifelong Learners in a World of Digital Transformation, OECD Publishing, Paris Wright K, McLeod J and Flenley R (2022). Positive education, schooling and the well-being assemblage: Old and new approaches to educating the whole child. In R McLellan, C Faucher and V Simovska (Eds.) Wellbeing and schooling: Cross cultural and cross disciplinary perspectives. Springer.

This study examines how schools in England and Denmark represent wellbeing on their webpages. School webpages are public-facing texts through which institutions articulate values and priorities to families, communities, and policymakers. The vocabularies schools employ shape the interpretive resources available, framing what counts as a thriving student and what responsibilities individuals are expected to assume. Our analytical framework draws on interpretative repertoires as developed within discursive psychology (Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Zembylas, 2003). Repertoires are recognisable patterns of terms, metaphors, and arguments that speakers draw upon to construct accounts of the world. Unlike broader dis-course analysis examining large-scale systems of meaning, repertoire analysis attends to specific argumentative resources actors deploy in concrete situations, anticipating that the same institutional actor may draw on multiple, even contradictory, ways of talking depending on audience and purpose. Resonating with Rorty's (1989) argument that vocabularies constitute what can be known and imagined, we examine how schools actively participate in constructing what wellbeing can mean within contemporary education. The study employs qualitative document analysis of school webpages. Purposeful sampling selected 100 schools from England and 100 public schools from Denmark. To ensure comparability, schools were stratified according to official performance indicators: Ofsted ratings in England and national wellbeing measurement scores (trivselsmåling) in Denmark. English schools were sampled proportionally according to national Ofsted distribution. Danish schools were ranked by wellbeing scores and divided into three equally distributed groups. Data generation involved systematic navigation of websites to extract all text explicitly addressing wellbeing, including dedicated wellbeing pages, mission statements, policy documents, and descriptions of student support services. The analytical process followed an abductive logic (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), moving iteratively between empirical material and theoretical concepts. The analysis reveals four distinct yet overlapping repertoires. The skills-based repertoire frames wellbeing as learnable, individualised capacity, drawing on vocabularies of self-regulation and resilience. The trans-formative repertoire links wellbeing to agency, democratic participation, ethical responsibility and formation. The social repertoire emphasises relational dimensions, framing wellbeing as co-constituted through belonging and mutual recognition. The whole-school repertoire situates wellbeing within material and organisational conditions. Significantly, schools rarely draw exclusively on a single repertoire, instead mobilising different vocabularies strategically, sometimes holding competing framings in tension.

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Over the past decade, wellbeing has shifted from a broad social concern to a central organising principle in education, both internationally and in Denmark (McLellan et al., 2022; Korsgaard et al., 2022). Following the 2013 Danish school reform, wellbeing was formalised as a core educational aim (Danish Ministry of Children and Education, 2013). Nevertheless, research indicates a decline in students’ experiences of school wellbeing, particularly among female students (Nielsen et al., 2020), LGBTI+ students (Greve et al., 2024), and students from minority ethnic backgrounds (Gilliam, 2025). These disparities highlight the limitations of universalised and individualised framings of wellbeing and call for perspectives that recognise that wellbeing is shaped by the intersections of gender, social class, sexuality, ethnicity, and other social categories entangled with the whole-school environment (Hancock, 2016). In this paper, we examine how wellbeing is enacted in students’ everyday school lives, through a qualitative study in a 6th and 8th-grade class at a public school in Denmark. Drawing on observations, interviews, and a participatory photo activity, we analyse how wellbeing is configured through daily interactions, practices, and school spaces. We activate Davies' concepts of ‘(be)longing’ and ‘landscape’ (Davies, 2000) together with Skeggs’ work with social class and gender (Skeggs,1997; Skeggs, 2004), to illuminate the multiplicity of intersecting subjectivities and heterogeneity of students’ experiences of wellbeing. By mapping the discursive terrain and situating competing discourses within the school landscape, the study shows how students, teachers, and institutional structures co-produce normative ideas of difference. Shaped by intersections of social class, ethnicity, and gender, certain bodies, behaviours, and forms of knowledge become differentially valued within classroom practices. These ongoing valuations delimit which student subjectivities can be recognised as legitimate and “thriving,” while positioning others as less intelligible or desirable. At the same time, the findings complicate readings of wellbeing as solely determined by social positioning. Although socio-economically, ethnically, and otherwise minoritised students often encounter restricted ac-cess to valued subject positions, they are not merely passive recipients of categorisation. Students actively negotiate the school landscape, drawing on available discourses to adopt, resist, or redefine subject positions in contextually situated ways. Acts of compliance, distancing, humour, silence, or collective affiliation emerge as agentic responses to intersectionally configured conditions. Wellbeing emerges neither as an in-dividual property nor as a static outcome of social positioning, but as a contingent phenomenon produced through ongoing negotiations of belonging, recognition, and value.

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