In recent years, the concept of children’s wellbeing has become firmly embedded in educational discourse and policy. While there is no universal agreement on how to define or measure wellbeing, there are two broad approaches. One is to develop objective indicators incorporating aspects of wellbeing such as education, health and economic conditions. The advantage is that these indicators can be used to examine variation in wellbeing across countries and over time. The main disadvantage is that this approach ignores the views of the children themselves. The second approach to measuring wellbeing overcomes this by asking the children directly about their subjective wellbeing. This is an important development given that Article 12 of the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) acknowledges children’s right to be heard and to have their views taken into account in matters that affect them. While the concept of wellbeing is somewhat neglected within the CRC, a recent study has suggested that children’s rights and wellbeing are inextricably linked and that, intriguingly, children and young people who are aware of the CRC and who feel their views are listened to in school have higher subjective wellbeing than their peers who do not. This is an important finding since it suggests a link between knowledge of rights and children’s wellbeing. One problem, however, is that while there are subjective wellbeing questionnaires which have been developed with some input from children (e.g. KIDSCREEN), there has not been, until recently, a measure of children’s participation rights. This has now been addressed with the development of a children’s rights participation questionnaire designed by a group of children in conjunction with researchers from the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queen’s University Belfast using a child rights-based research approach. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between children’s subjective wellbeing and their perceptions of their participation rights using this newly developed questionnaire.

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