A Guide to Wellbeing Education  

PESA's Vision and Mission

• Vision: To accelerate the prioritisation of evidence-informed wellbeing education for the future of Australians.

• Mission: To advocate, educate and collaborate to grow and embed wellbeing education throughout Australia.

As a not-for-profit peak body, PESA helps schools embed wellbeing into practice through evidence-informed tools, professional learning and national advocacy -  driving system-wide, long-term transformation.

“When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget
to educate their hearts.”

- Dalai Lama

What Does a Flourishing School and Community Look Like?

A flourishing school is a dynamic, holistic state where a group is feeling good, functioning effectively, and doing good for others (Huppert, 2009), going beyond the absence of illness to genuine positive functioning and social participation. Key features:

• Systems perspective: wellbeing of students, staff and families is interconnected (Kern & Wehmeyer, 2021; Cobo-Rendón et al., 2025)

• "Learn it, Live it, Teach it, Embed it": staff model wellbeing before teaching it

• Student agency and voice: flourishing is done with students, not to them

• Inclusive environments: diversity as strength, belonging for all

Flourishing is often structured around frameworks like PERMA (see Wellbeing Frameworks Guide).

Collective Resilience: Flourishing as a Community

A flourishing community possesses the capacity for collective transformation and resilience (Kern & Wehmeyer, 2021; Cobo-Rendón et. al., 2025):

• Collective identity: communities move from "self" to "we" under adversity

• Shared responsibility: wellbeing as a mission shared across school, family and community

• Ethical horizon: aiming for a "virtuous we-being," good for people and planet

Every interaction, from lessons to parent partnerships, builds an ecosystem of collective flourishing, preparing students for purposeful, productive lives as global citizens.

The Critical Role of Educator Wellbeing

Educators are the backbone of the school community, and their wellbeing is a critical determinant of high-quality education and positive social-academic outcomes (McCallum, 2021). Educator and child wellbeing are inextricably linked, particularly in settings where the adult's emotional state directly shapes the classroom climate and the learner's sense of safety (Baker et al., 2017; Immordino-Yang et al., 2019).

• Authentic Modeling: A fundamental role for staff is to "learn it and live it" before they "teach it and embed it" (Hoare et al., 2017). Students possess a "honed radar for authenticity" and benefit most from witnessing adults who model patient, safe, and flourishing behavior (Brunzell, 2021).
• Capacity for Care: There is a direct connection between an educator's personal wellbeing and their capacity to provide high-quality care, de-escalate student resistance, and maintain unconditional positive regard (Baker et al., 2017; Brunzell, 2021).
• Neural State for Teaching: Just as students require emotional stability to learn, teachers require it to provide effective emotional support and navigate the daily demands of an "intensely personal" vocation (Baker et al., 2017; Immordino-Yang et al., 2019).

ltimately, because "schools thrive when principals [and teachers] thrive," educator wellbeing must be treated as a collective responsibility of the entire system rather than just an individual burden (McCallum, 2021).

A whole-child and whole-staff perspective (whole-school approach) recognises the interconnectedness of academic, social, and emotional growth.

 Wellbeing isn’t a program - it’s a culture.

What is a Whole School Approach?

To be effective, schools must adopt a systems-informed, whole-school approach that embeds wellbeing into the fabric of the entire community, including policy, culture, and both the "taught and caught" curriculum (Arguís-Rey, 2021; Runions et al., 2021).

This perspective views the school as a complex human social system where individual and collective flourishing are recognised as mutually dependent goals (Kern & Taylor, 2021; Runions et al., 2021).

Critically, wellbeing initiatives cannot be applied as a one-size-fits-all template; they must be context-based, responsive to the particular cultural, socioeconomic, and community realities of each school. A wellbeing approach that thrives in one setting may fail in another if it does not account for local values, language, family structures, and the lived experiences of students and staff. Genuine, sustainable impact depends on schools tailoring whole-school approaches to their own context, drawing on the strengths, needs, and cultural knowledge already present within their community, rather than importing generic programs.

More information  about systems informed wellbeing in  A guide to Wellbeing Science

 Why Wellbeing Literacy Matters

Wellbeing doesn't just happen - it's built, in part, through the language we use to understand and express it. Wellbeing literacy is defined as the capability to comprehend and compose wellbeing-related language across contexts, with the intention of maintaining or improving the wellbeing of oneself, others, or the world (Oades et al., 2021). In practical terms, it's the ability to recognise, name, and communicate about wellbeing in ways that are genuinely useful - not just knowing the vocabulary, but knowing how and when to use it.

This matters because language is one of the few levers available at a whole-population scale for shifting wellbeing outcomes. Oades et al. (2021) argue that achieving population-level wellbeing requires a ubiquitous systemic lever, and that intentional language use represents exactly that. For schools, this reframes wellbeing education: it's not only about teaching students what wellbeing is, but building their capacity to talk about it — to themselves, to peers, and to the adults around them — in ways that are context-sensitive and genuinely supportive (Oades & Jarden, 2021).

The evidence base is growing quickly. Hou et al. (2021) tested a six-item wellbeing literacy scale across three large Australian samples — students, parents, and school staff — and found wellbeing literacy to be empirically distinct from general wellbeing, resilience, and emotion regulation, while also predicting meaningful variance in wellbeing and illbeing beyond those established constructs. In other words, teaching people to comprehend and compose wellbeing language isn't a soft add-on — it does distinct, measurable work.

For schools, the practical implication is clear: professional learning and curriculum design should build staff and student capacity not just to experience wellbeing practices, but to talk about them fluently — recognising emotional states, naming strengths, and communicating support in ways tailored to the person and moment. That shared, intentional language is what turns individual wellbeing knowledge into a genuinely collective, whole-school capability.