Contextual Wellbeing

The suicide of a popular young Bollywood actor last week in Mumbai has cast the spotlight on the issues of success, mental health and wellbeing. This case has once again forced us to ask the question about what success looks like and what we are aspiring for? While we may all agree that our job as parents and as schools is to prepare our children to face the big bad world, we will not all agree on what that world looks like and what that preparation should be.

One prevailing belief that we have often encountered in our work is that children need to be more resilient and to toughen up, they need to put themselves at the front of the queue and if they don’t then they will never get to a good enough college, never get a good enough high-paying job and never be happy enough. This myth, fed by a particularly brutal and one dimensional university admission process in India that reduces everything to a percentage, needs to be challenged. The actor was a brilliant student, securing one of the highest ranks in India’s most competitive exams to get admission into a prestigious university, then went on to become a Bollywood star. From an outsiders perspective he had everything, yet something was clearly missing from his life or from his capacity to deal with it and the environment he was working in.

What is Contextual Wellbeing?

We recently read Contextual Wellbeing; Creating Positive Schools from the Inside Out by Dr. Helen Street (2018) and wanted to share what we learned from it and how it corresponds with our experience in schools. Street describes Contextual Wellbeing as, “a state of health, happiness and positive engagement (in learning) that arises from membership of an equitable, inclusive and cohesive (school) environment”… that may not sound like what we know of Bollywood.

Rather than asking, “How can we better support young people’s mental health and wellbeing in schools?” Street argues that we need to start asking, “How can we create a social context that better supports young people’s mental health and wellbeing in schools?”

There are many courses, workshops and programmes that promote wellbeing and happiness in schools; indeed, wellbeing is a global industry. The Delhi Government introduced its own Happiness Curriculum in 2019 with the aim to, “make the education system an enabler for the all-round development of humankind.” Street examines whether the outcomes of these interventions in schools are the improved mental health and wellbeing that we expect. Unfortunately for our students, she finds that while these programmes may appear helpful in the short-term, they will not cause any lasting positive change to wellbeing and happiness if the school context, the sum of all the environmental factors in school, are not examined, understood and reimagined to increase wellbeing.

Street says that, “instead of helping an individual in distress by asking them to change - to become more confident/resilient etc, what if the answer is more about creating a healthier environment for that individual? Just as happiness is an appropriate response to a healthy environment, sadness is an appropriate response to an unhealthy one”. She is inviting us to pay more attention to our social systems and the impact they have on students and staff in schools (and in Bollywood too).

It’s the environmental consideration that makes the wellbeing of students and staff in schools contextual. An increase in health, happiness and positive engagement comes from all of the environmental factors in schools that principals, heads of departments and teachers have control over, and the responsibility to ensure are optimised for the community’s wellbeing.

This corresponds with years of seeing children making their way through schools with their peers, some thriving and some isolated and disconnected. It resonates with what Russell Brand and Johann Hari (see his TED Talk) say about the opposite of connection being addiction and with what Bruce Alexander et al. (1981) found experimentally that suggested addiction and its associated behaviours were not a problem of chemical dependency, but of environment.

Wellbeing in schools today. “Are wellbeing programs band aids for ‘broken’ educational contexts? (Street, 2018)”

With a rise in adolescent depression (Mojtabai et al, 2016, Mission Australia and Black Dog Institute Youth Mental Health Report 2016) and a decrease in wellbeing for both students and teachers (Teacher Wellbeing Index 2019, Education Support) the response has, for some time now, been dominated by interventions with programmes, speakers, curriculum or workshops… but little attention is given to the school and the system in which the students and teachers work.

The system is often taken to be a self-evident truth, a reality and set of norms that everyone conforms to and works within. In his commencement speech to Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005, David Foster-Wallace summed this up beautifully with a story about two fish who meet an older fish swimming towards them. “Morning boys, how’s the water?” the older fish asks as he goes by. Eventually one fish turns to the other and asks, ‘what the hell is water?’ Wallace went on to say that, “the most obvious important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about”, and this is certainly the case in institutions and organisations that talk about and cherish tradition and legacy.

Indeed, Street writes that, “Autonomy is severely compromised in a context that encourages compliance and obedience. Relatedness is compromised in a context that supports competition and outcomes over process”. She shows through her own research and examples from other psychological studies that this system blindness means that any short-term improvements in wellbeing through interventions will eventually be undermined by the strength of the unwritten rules, the norms, of the system that one finds themselves surrounded by.

When we talk about ensuring an optimal school environment we very quickly think about optimising it for success, and the definition of success in schools has become very narrow; grades, ECAs, sports, prizes and university placement… and what does that system usually look like? Competition, judgment and comparison… all things that the studies and Street’s research show actually work against both learning and wellbeing.

What do parents want from their child’s schooling?

It’s right that we want every child in school to do as well as possible and receive offers from colleges and universities in which they will become the young adults they dream of being, but what are we currently sacrificing for this on the sports fields, in classrooms and in examination halls? UNICEF’s 2007 report into the wellbeing of children in rich countries begins with the statement, “The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialisation, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.” UNICEF measured children's wellbeing across six dimensions; material wellbeing (poverty), health and safety, educational wellbeing, family and peer relationships, behaviours and risks, and subjective (self-reported) wellbeing.

UNICEF was aiming to establish, “whether their circumstances are such that they are likely to become all that they are capable of becoming, or whether they are disadvantaged in ways that make it difficult or impossible for them to participate fully in the life and opportunities of the world around them.” Becoming all that they are capable of is what an education should facilitate and we would argue that success needs to be defined in these richer and more nuanced terms rather than through the easy to measure results of standardised tests, state, or national examinations that can be mugged up for and ‘cracked’. Like IQ tests, these assessments are particularly good at measuring the candidates’ ability or means to prepare for them, adding further inequity to the educational landscape.

While a few parents around the world are able to make a choice about the educational system into which their child is placed, most are lucky if they have a choice about whether that education is government or private, local, worthy of a commute, whether they need to board or whether it’s church affiliated or secular. Most will also be looking at the examination board, the brand, of that education whether it’s CBSE, ISC, Cambridge or International Baccalaureate.

Parents want their children to succeed in education, presumably this is because they see education as a foundation or the key to what comes later. It would be awful to reach one’s peak at school and what parents really want is for their child to be successful in life. The OECD Library report on Students’ Well-being from 2017 cited Martin Seligman, author of Flourish (2012) when they reported that, “if parents around the world are asked what they want for their children, some might mention “achievement” or “success”, but most would reply “happiness”, “confidence”, “kindness”, “health”, “satisfaction”, and the like (Seligman et al., 2009).

The irony is that the system in most schools has become such that what constitutes success, both there and at university, is not a useful enough foundation or predictor of success in life. While student support services have grown to meet the demand and need for care, the system that contributes the most to that need remains overwhelmingly unchanged; the educational industry maintains itself at the expense of the people who it should be serving and will use to evaluate its own success.

Please share your thoughts about what you think success should look like in schools and what works well to support wellbeing and learning in the schools you know. We will come back to this next week with your ideas and contributions. What do you think we as educators and administrators can do to make our context better for healthy, happy and positive engagement between students and teachers?

Thank you to Udayan Philip, Wellbeing Counsellor at The Doon School for his inspiration and collaboration in the writing of this article and to our editor in Delhi for improving its own context.