Wellbeing, Creating Citizens? The School Agenda

This paper draws on critical discourse analysis of policy and practice enacted in UK schools in the name of children’s social and emotional wellbeing. It has two main aims: first to sketch the background of schools’ involvement in social and emotional wellbeing and how this discourse in schools has been fed by and incorporates employability and citizenship; second to discuss tensions that we perceive between on the one hand employability and citizenship as educational outcomes in schools, and on the other the nature of social and emotional wellbeing as subjective, relational and contextual (Konu and Rimpela, 2002). We offer a critique of a narrow employability agenda in schools, whether in social and emotional wellbeing programmes or citizenship studies, on the basis that such an agenda sits uneasily with stated citizenship curriculum aims of analysing and evaluating sources, questioning values and recognising bias (DFE, 2011) and since its implicit neo liberal values may themselves adversely impact children’s social and emotional wellbeing in school.