Dr Catriona O’Toole
Associate Professor in Psychology of Education, Maynooth University Department of Education
Dr Paul O’Callaghan
Assistant Professor/Lecturer, Doctorate in Educational Psychology, Department of Education and Department of Psychology, Maynooth University
Wellbeing has moved to the centre of global education debates, and rightly so. Young people are navigating an increasingly complex, uncertain world, contributing to rising levels of stress and disconnection.
Schools and educators are working within these same pressures, shaped by widening inequalities, the demands of digital culture and intensifying workloads. While there’s broad agreement that wellbeing matters, there’s less clarity on how it should be meaningfully realised in practice.
Seeing wellbeing as an educational goal
Too often, wellbeing risks becoming an ‘add-on’: a timetabled subject, policy requirement or a discrete initiative. While these are important, they can unintentionally narrow how wellbeing is understood.
When confined to a programme, its potential is diluted. Wellbeing isn’t something extra that teachers do — it’s embedded in how they teach, relate and build classroom environments. It’s lived through relationships, school culture and everyday interactions. It should be recognised as an educational goal and foundational to engagement, learning and long-term outcomes.
If wellbeing is to move beyond rhetoric, it must be understood as collective, relational and embedded; woven into the fabric of everyday educational practice
Wellbeing is also frequently framed as an individual responsibility through resilience-building or emotional regulation programmes. While valuable, these approaches can overlook the wider social, structural and environmental conditions shaping students’ lives.
The risk is that responsibility is shifted onto individual students to modify their behaviour or mindset, while the broader social determinants of wellbeing — inequality, power imbalances and structural conditions —remain insufficiently addressed.
Wellbeing as collective practice
Supporting wellbeing calls for whole-school, systemic thinking — spanning culture, curriculum, pedagogy, policy and partnerships — alongside a strong emphasis on relationships, inclusion, equality and children’s rights, with students actively involved in co-designing wellbeing initiatives.
If wellbeing is to move beyond rhetoric, it must be understood as collective, relational and embedded; woven into the fabric of everyday educational practice. A forthcoming special issue, ‘Advancing Equity, Voice, and Sustainability in School Wellbeing,’ initiated by Maynooth University, explores these themes further.
