In China recently, there has been a government push for a more holistic approach to education that does not just prize academic excellence, but also improves students’ physical and mental wellbeing.

As part of this drive, public schools will be required to provide a minimum of two hours of daily physical activity by 2027.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has launched its National Strategy for Wellbeing 2031, which, in Dubai, for instance, will see student happiness tracked through annual census data.

The upshot is that “wellbeing is becoming a policy requirement rather than a school-level choice” in several jurisdictions, according to ISC Research, which recently published a wellbeing White Paper in a bid to shed light on effective approaches.

At a recent webinar, Janelle Torres, ISC Research’s research manager for South East Asia, delved into the findings.

There are, she said, “three approaches that consistently define effective practice” in international schools when it comes to student wellbeing, which she summed up as: culture, curriculum and data.

Making wellbeing part of school identity

Cultural integration, she said, means wellbeing is “embedded in daily behaviours, leadership decisions and relationships”.

In terms of curriculum, there needs to be “structured teaching that builds resilience, emotional literacy and healthy learning habits”, while data is about “informed strategy” and “using feedback and evidence to adjust approaches and measure what truly makes a difference”.

She said: “When these three elements work together, wellbeing stops being a programme and becomes part of a school’s identity.”

However, Torres noted there are challenges international schools face when attempting to deliver on this agenda, including “high mobility, cultural differences and academic pressure”.

Constantly starting over can make students flexible and resilient, but it can also be “exhausting” - and the staff experience is “equally complex” with every move requiring them to “adapt to a new school culture, new expectations and a new community”.

Leadership turnover in the sector, meanwhile, can be high, affecting “trust, stability and sometimes staff retention” and schools are becoming more complex, running “multiple curricula or hybrid models which require ongoing training and coordination”.

Carving out time for CARE

Despite all the complexity, some schools were making inroads, she said, with Deira International School in Dubai and also Strothoff International School in Germany flagged as examples.

Strothoff International School has actually carved out space in the timetable to prioritise student wellbeing.

The school has gone from five-minute “homeroom-style” start-of-day check-ins to 45-minute CARE (creativity, agency, responsibility and empathy) slots “at the core of the day”, explained Julia Campbell-Ratcliffe, secondary principal - a topic she wrote about in detail in an article for Tes earlier this year.

The main concern when the change was introduced, said Campbell-Ratcliffe, was the time taken away from other priorities, but, ultimately, “people got on board with it faster than expected”, and there was no backlash from parents.

Now the dedicated time for proper check-ins with students has been running for five years, and “the benefits are seen by the whole community”, she said.

Also, because CARE teachers typically deliver at least two other subjects, “CARE spills into the other lessons as well”, she said.

Supporting burnt-out staff

Megha Jootla, primary wellbeing and pastoral lead at Deira International School, said this had begun to happen at her school as well.

Wellbeing had been embedded in the curriculum so that all students could learn to better understand their feelings and acquire different strategies to resolve conflict - not just those participating in one-on-one counselling.

However, it was beginning to permeate the whole school because the language young people are using to express themselves - for instance, talking about “zones of regulation” - is becoming “part of the dialogue”.

Asked what her advice would be to schools embarking on their wellbeing journey, Jootla emphasised the importance of supporting staff wellbeing, as well as student wellbeing, and addressing concerns like workload or behaviour.

Burnt-out staff, she said, cannot be “stable, supportive” adults for students. This means truly ensuring there is strong staff wellbeing through a supportive culture that addresses the challenges teachers face - rather than offering “tokenistic gestures” like free coffee and occasional cake.

Getting to know your context

Equally important, though, was her advice to “get to know your context”.

There was “a huge advantage” in learning from others, she acknowledged, but “we need to do things that suit our community, our parents, our staff, our leaders, our students,” she added.

Deira International School moved from annual wellbeing surveys with delayed results to, in 2022, implementing regular, child-friendly surveys that provided immediate results.

This data was then used to guide individual interventions, year-group initiatives and whole-school planning.

For instance, there were consistently low scores in emotional articulation, which led to the adoption of zones of regulation, giving students strategies to manage and express emotions.

Given the importance of this sort of data, Matthew Savage, a former international school principal and current governor at St George’s International School in Luxembourg, questioned why some schools are willing to have lower response rates for wellbeing surveys than for “an end-of-term maths assessment”.

Emphasis on wellbeing and academic achievement

His message on this - and more generally - is that there needs to be as much emphasis placed by schools on wellbeing as academic achievement.

As the above nations’ push to promote student wellbeing shows, this is a call being heeded as policymakers and parents demonstrate a demand for “a more balanced approach to education”, noted Torres.

ISC Research market research indicates parents are increasingly voting with their feet in, for instance, in Singapore and India, and selecting schools that are not just academically excellent but that give equal weight to their students’ health and happiness.

Wellbeing, therefore, summed up Torres, is “no longer an add-on” or “a side topic” - it is “a key measure of a high performing school”.