This research paper is stage 1 of a PhD study concerned with the design and evaluation of a conceptual wellbeing framework for new Irish primary schools. The conceptual framework will be informed by the data from key actors involved in new schools. The data gathered in this study is intended to inform the development of an ecological conceptual framework that will be piloted during the author’s PhD study. 

The aim of this study was to analyse the principals’ experiences of wellbeing held in the context of new Irish primary schools. To provide background to this research, in April 2018 the Department of Education and Skills (DES) in Ireland announced plans to build 42 new schools to be established between 2019 and 2022.  The author was appointed the founding principal of one of these new schools and initially found very little guidance on the development of ethos, culture and climate in a new school. The DES Small Schools Symposium in June 2019 further reinforced these observations, which included the following:

• duplication of effort whereby each principal had to begin each founding school without guidance.
• lack of support, training and resources and specific continuing professional development  

Burke and Dempsey (2021) study has subsequently established a direct link between leaders’ wellbeing and the pressures associated with their daily tasks. COVID-19 has also added to these demands. This is echoed by Harris and Jones (2020), who argue that the priority for wellbeing must extend to school leaders and teachers, as well as students. As a result, the purpose of this study is to unravel the experience and perspective of wellbeing held by principals of new schools (*a new school in this study is a school that has been set up since 2013), using Actor Network Theory (ANT). 

ANT posits that ideas, practices and ‘facts’ are effects of heterogeneous webs of relations between actors, or ‘assemblages’, a notion similar to Deleuze’s ‘agencement’ (Law, 2008). ANT is used in this research to identify how practices, assemblages, and webs of relationships human and non-human things impact on the wellbeing of new school principals. Furthermore, ANT is used to identify ‘problematisations’ or challenges that new school principals experience and how these problematisations impact on their wellbeing. The problematisations from the ANT analysis are filtered further, to identify how they affect individual discourses of wellbeing. For the purposes of this research, wellbeing is comprised through the discourse of physical health promotion, the psychological discourse of social and emotional literacy, the discourse of care, the philosophical discourse of flourishing, and the emergent discourse of sustainability (Spratt, 2017)

Consequently, the key research questions of this research are:

• How is wellbeing in new schools constructed within the Irish context? 
• What does wellbeing mean to new school principals from the perspective of both school wellbeing and personal wellbeing?
• How do professional and personal relationships impact on new school principals wellbeing?
• What wellbeing structures or supports are available to new school principals? 
• What wellbeing practices are in operation in new schools?
• What links exist  between wellbeing and the ingrained structures within the education system?
• What are the challenges  or concerns that principals experience and the ‘things’ or actors that enable or hinder wellbeing?

A series of nine focus group interviews and three semi-structured interviews, lasting approximately 45 minutes, were conducted in November and December 2021, with developing (new) school principals (n=12) online via Microsoft Teams. Participating school principals worked across a diverse range of communities in Ireland, and also had a varied amount of leadership experiences as a school principal. Qualitative data from interviews were transcribed and emergent themes were identified using ANT. In order to understand how social actions shape wellbeing, this research adopted a number of phases as a roadmap. The phases listed below (adapted from McBride, 2000) outline the precise research methodology applied in this study. • Identify the actors: Comprise of human or non-human actors which influence or become influenced by other actor’s policies and practices. • Investigate the actors: Understanding the character of the stakeholders through interviews with network representatives, accessing documentation, understanding their attitudes, interactions, interests, etc. • Identify actor interactions (‘Follow the Actors): Tracing interactions between stakeholders to explore the level of influence between stakeholders (e.g. trust and control). • Construct an actor network model: Construct an actor-network model to determine for example, the networks complexity, cohesion, strength, and influence. Examine irreversibility: Determine to what degree it is difficult to make a change, e.g. through understanding the culture and the nature of acceptance in the network. • Source of inhibitors and enablers: Determine who enables and inhibits actions to shape wellbeing and the network under investigation, e.g. wellbeing attitudes, resistance, or network infrastructure. • Tracing actions: Identify what activities led to the alignment of the actor network, for example, training. • Reporting on the actor-network: Report on the overall nature of the network and explain how social actions shapes wellbeing within the network. This process allowed for themes, or as Latour (2005)would refer to as problematisations to initially emerge from the data and in turn, for the theoretical concepts to shape the themes.

Our study highlights that new school principals were deeply committed to ensuring that the wellbeing of the school community is nurtured. At times, this has been shown to come at the cost of increased participant stress, concern for themselves, their own wellbeing or that of their own families. Much of this stress that is highlighted in this study is a direct result of lack of structures for the development of new schools. There was a deep sense of frustration in relation to the DES. The lack of adequate structures, governance or guidance have left principals of new schools feeling isolated and exhausted. Inevitable questions are also raised around what is expected of school principals, what is feasible for them, given available resources and how to formally address the inevitable stresses that come with the job (O’Toole and Simovska 2021; Burke and Dempsey 2021). The absence of an equitable allocation model for Special Education Teaching and for teaching staff allocation has instilled a deep sense of guilt and anger amongst principals. An equitable allocation of teachers, special education teachers and special needs assistants needs to be provided to new schools to take account of the context of a new school. In terms of tangible supports, a number of recommendations have emerged from this study. An operations manual or guidance document for new schools is seen as a simple solution to a lot of needs. New school principals also acknowledged that relationships have helped to enable experiences of wellbeing. Informal support from other principals who have had particular experiences of setting up new schools was seen as a particularly important relationship to invest within. Specific formal coaching or mentoring by someone with relevant contextual experience of a new school also would be beneficial.

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