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Wilson, Rosanna (2025) ‘Teaching wellbeing’ in secondary schools in the 2020s: a qualitative interview and focus group project with secondary school teachers in England. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.

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Abstract

The state of mental health and wellbeing for young people and their teachers has been a rising concern in recent decades. Across OECD countries, there has been an increased focus on wellbeing in schools within policy and practice. Teachers are at the frontline of these issues. In 2020, the covid-19 pandemic arose, adding further complexity. In England, the teaching profession was required to absorb new policy requirements and “teach” wellbeing. Scant research existed to explore the practice implications for teachers as increased emphasis on wellbeing expectations emerged.

This interpretive qualitative project conducted with teachers (n=25) from regional state-maintained secondary schools (n=15) investigated: a) teachers’ concept of wellbeing, b) their experience of wellbeing in teaching practice and c) tensions and barriers. Informed by Etienne Wenger’s communities of practice approach, fieldwork took place in three rounds of data collection from Autumn-Winter 2020-21 to Summer-Winter 2021-2022, and is published in three individual articles.

Findings demonstrated dual conceptions of wellbeing as ‘doing well’ and ‘being well’, where ‘being well’ was conceived as relational rather than individual, and foundational to ‘doing well’. Measures to promote wellbeing during return from school pandemic closures were seen as thwarted by the drive for attainment outcomes. As behavioural challenges arose, related to the disaster recovery and trauma resultant from the pandemic, teachers talked of ‘survival’. Multiple wellbeing initiatives based on philosophies of embodiment, person-centred traditions and inter-disciplinarity were emergent in teachers’ practice and school settings, yet teachers saw initiatives for wellbeing as resting ‘out of the realm of the classroom’ whilst schooling remains so strongly tethered to neoliberal governance. Teachers’ imaginaries for a ‘turning’ towards relational pedagogy, engaging with students’ living and complex communities/world were considered little practicable within neoliberal ‘education as usual’ despite hopes for an ‘education reset’. Yet this project also points to openings whereby policy and practice shifts offer levers for integrative rather than additive approaches to wellbeing through schooling.

Item Type:	Thesis (University of Nottingham only) (PhD)
Supervisors:	Sellman, Edward Joseph, Stephen
Keywords:	secondary schools, teachers, wellbeing, pandemic, education recovery, neoliberal education, care, relational pedagogy
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1024 Teaching L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1603 Secondary education. High schools
Faculties/Schools:	UK Campuses > Faculty of Social Sciences, Law and Education > School of Education
Item ID:	80807
Depositing User:	Wilson, Rosanna
Date Deposited:	26 Jul 2025 04:40
Last Modified:	26 Jul 2025 04:40
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/80807

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