The purpose of the paper is to interrogate the 2015 Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act as a trigger for policy debates on how schools could address the consequences of child poverty on learning engagement and wellbeing. We relate this to a case study in Queensland, Australia, investigating how school leaders and teachers conceptualise and support student wellbeing. We firstly articulate a professional concern Australian educators have with child poverty: what they understand of it and how they respond. In turn this builds a critical understanding of the effects of de-industrialisation and austerity on schooling and of the Global Educational Reform Movement or GERM (Sahlberg, 2015), which means developing a sharp acknowledgment in their professional work of how the GERM shapes the everyday experiences and demands of schooling with devastating consequences for children and their families living with poverty. The case study presented here was initially concerned with Australian wellbeing policy triggers and school leadership decisions behind student well-being and learning engagement in two schools in one coastal community. These schools were grappling with changing demographics and re-gentrification of the school-community, a challenge for providers of public education for children of families who are predominantly key workers. The data from interviews between the authors and school leaders lent itself to analyses informed by Basil Bernstein’s (1990; 1996) concepts of rules and fields, particularly recontextualization, recognition and realisation, but the task here is to return to what and how educators in Australia can learn from the 2015 Well-being legislation in Wales. This all plugs into a wider Brisbane city-based case study, which makes for a rich contribution from the Australian contingent to the multi-cities ethnography project (Beckett, 2023; Whatman et al, 2019). There is much to be learned from international partners featured in this symposium given their professional commitment to educative responses to child poverty, which in turn helps further develop responsive/educative work in Australian school wellbeing.

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