This paper provides the first UK 'home international' comparative analysis of social and emotional wellbeing in schools, drawing on analysis of policy texts and data collected from schools across the four UK home nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland). Since the devolution of education to the four home nations, they have each developed distinctive policy approaches in the area of social and emotional wellbeing. Each countries' approach is premised on distinctive conceptualisations of what is meant by social and emotional wellbeing and how this can be improved through schooling. This paper seeks to address four key questions here. First, we put forward a new theoretical framework to conceptualise what is meant by social and emotional wellbeing. Second, we apply this framework to see how each of the UK's four education systems compare in their conceptualisations of social and emotional wellbeing. Finally, drawing on data collected from schools themselves, we examine how schools in these four countries perceive the policies they are subject to - and importantly, how they 'enact' them within their school context. This provides a unique assessment of how the four countries fare in this important policy area.

There has never been a more important time to understand how education systems across the world address young people's social and emotional wellbeing. The UK's four distinctive education systems provide an ideal case to study the differential impacts of policy. Cultural commentators have described today’s youth as more isolated, and atomised than their predecessors, using the term ‘I[phone]Gen[eration]’ (Twenge 2017) to refer to the dominance of virtual relationships and technological interaction over real-world socialising, and sedentary leisure pursuits over collective ones (Putnam 2000) resulting in anxiety, communication problems and difficulties in navigating relationships. The phrase ‘snowflake generation’ (Fox 2016) has been used by some to describe what is perceived as a young population who are emotionally unable to cope with what are regarded as the ‘everyday realities of life’. While such labels are value laden there is evidence to suggest that young people are becoming more anxious, for example psychologist Jean Twenge analysed 269 studies, with a total of 52,000 US adolescents, and found a continuous upward trend in anxiety levels across the second half of the 20^th century (see Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). Embedded within this debate is a perception that young people are not being prepared to cope with everyday challenges, and are emotionally ‘weaker’ than past generations. In terms of the social and emotional wellbeing of young people, one of the key lessons to come from the COVID-19 pandemic is the importance of their relationships and connectedness to others.

The policy response to such challenges has been to shift attention towards the social and emotional dimensions of learning as fundamental to schools’ role in children’s development. This narrative is highly problematic on a number of levels, not least because it fails to acknowledge the pressures faced by contemporary youth brought about by social and economic change. It fails to acknowledge the onus now placed on the individual to navigate their own choices and trajectories as ‘consumers’ in an increasingly fragile economy where there is no longer a straight forward relationship between education credentials and labour market outcomes. More generally, it does not account for the increasingly performative and market-based logic that has come to dominate the ends and increasingly the means by which educational outcomes are measured and pursued, and the consequential impact on young people. 

This paper draws on the analysis of policy documents as well as data collected from schools across the UK's four home nations. Analysis was carried out on 26 policy documents from across the four UK home nations. The initial selection was made according to the four identified policy areas; pastoral care, discipline and behaviour, labour market preparation and educational inclusion. These foci informed keyword searches within the government policy databases across each of the four nation. We selected the most recent key documents in each area. In selecting these documents, we were conscious of the fact that policy is not only found in ‘official’ policy texts issue by Government departments, but is carried through a range of documents, artefacts and instruments that go beyond these official texts. Taking account of this broad view of policy, we also selected satellite documents that were cross referenced within the key documents. This included from across bodies responsible for curriculum development, Government departments of education, professional development bodies and other arms’ length organisations working at the secondary level of education. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted on the selected policy texts, guided by the following questions: how do the different ‘home’ nations conceptualise social and emotional wellbeing? What do they believe are the gaps in schools’ provision? In what ways do they seek to build social and emotional skills in their respective domiciles? What do they believe the school’s role to be? What is the nature of any solutions they propose and how do they envisage they should be delivered? Data was collected from schools through national surveys in each 'home nation' with a purposefully selected sample to account for differences in their socio-economic intake. The survey collected information on how key actors within each school understood and enacted the policies they were subject to. From this survey, we also conducted a series of 10 interviews with teachers across the four countries to further understand their understandings and enactment of policy on social and emotional wellbeing.

A major contribution of this paper is to delineate competing approaches to understanding and addressing social and emotional wellbeing. In this paper, we identify three discrete conceptualisations, which have been used to approach schools’ role in the area of children’s social and emotional wellbeing; ‘skills and competencies’, ‘morals and ethics’ and ‘capital and identity’. While there are clear lines of overlap, they are distinctive in two key ways, firstly, to what extent social and emotional wellbeing is conceptualised as a universal objective for the whole student population, versus the extent it is pursued for target population groups, and secondly, the extent to which the emphasis is upon the individual child as the agent for generating SEW, versus to what extent it is the consequence of societal conditions (social, environmental or structural), therefore responsible to the actions of other social actors including the school, family, community and state. Each of the four home nations of the UK take distinctive policy approaches to addressing young people's social and emotional wellbeing. Their policies are underpinned by competing conceptualisations - with the 3 conceptualisations present to differing degrees across the countries - ‘skills and competencies’ was more prevalent in England ,whilst a ‘morals and ethics’ and ‘capital and identity’ more apparent in Scotland and Wales. Our data also reveal differences between the home nations of the UK in how school understand and enact the policy they are subject to. There is much lower levels of awareness of policy in England, with a lower rate of 'traction' gained by policy here, compared to much stronger awareness in Scotland and Wales where policy appears to have a much stronger footing in their respective schools. Our findings underline the importance of holistic policy approaches to social and emotional wellbeing which appear more impactful in schools.

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