Conference Program

Wellbeing is central to international policies since the Stiglitz, Sen, Fitoussi commission (2009), whose work stays current. Belotti and Moretti (2011) identified 12 domains of children’s wellbeing in 6 international studies, with educational wellbeing cutting-across them. Internationally, wellbeing is thematized in OECD’s IELS Study, “Measuring what counts” and “How’s life” series, it is part of the UN SDGs and is included in the European Commission’s 2030 strategy. Simply put, wellbeing is a precondition to learning and (pre)schools (as secondary socialization agents) are a major context for student wellbeing and agency (Corsaro, Fingerson, 2006). A pioneer in this field is Montessori (1999; 2000) that considered children as active agents of their growth and wellbeing in the prepared environment.

After COVID-19, wellbeing is crucial considering increased episodes of disruptive student behaviour, technological overload, absenteeism and dropout (OECD, 2024; Lee, Zarnic, 2024). However, student wellbeing at school is a highly situated concept and defining it for its operationalization is challenging. The ISCW study focuses on subjective wellbeing including affective (positive/negative) and cognitive life satisfaction (Ben Arieh, 2025), yet its scales are too detailed for national evaluation of school settings.

Linking evaluation to wellbeing might sound bizarre, but it is not. This paper addresses student wellbeing through an innovative study, part of a broader programme on school effectiveness and improvement (Freddano, Stringher, 2021). In Italy, curricular guidelines for the first cycle of education emphasise child wellbeing, especially in preschool (MIUR, 2012). The Italian national system for educational evaluation (Presidential Decree 80/2013) is promoting school quality since 2015 with a specific national self-evaluation format for all schools to use (INVALSI, 2014). Preschools have experimented a specific version of this format in 2018-2020 (Freddano, Stringher, 2021; Previtali, Stringher, 2017) and its revision has been extended to national level in 2025 (Freddano, 2025).

This theoretical contribution aims to describe the participatory quali-quantitative methodology behind the creation, with national stakeholders, of the updated (Pre)school Self-Evaluation Format. P-SEF includes a specific focus on wellbeing at school, through a set of indicators related to children’s and teachers’ wellbeing. This project is the result of a 10-year process (Stringher, 2025) for the identification of the indicators ultimately included in the format and concerning: child and youth wellbeing in (pre)schools as indexed by teachers’ perceptions; data collection methods in (pre)schools concerning student wellbeing; (pre)schools’ climate and its orientation to students’ and teachers’ wellbeing.

Data collection has been carried out in 2025 in almost 20,000 (pre)schools nationwide. The outputs of the study are quantitative measures of wellbeing; an additional output concerns the data collection platform for large-scale application at national level.

Outcomes, according to initial analyses, seem to merit further scrutiny, as student wellbeing seems to decrease sharply from preschool to secondary education. Practice, research and policy implications are manyfold and include ways to engage all (pre)schools in data literacy for wellbeing, yielding better student outcomes, and additional analyses on school processes’ determinants of students’ and teachers’ wellbeing in different school contexts. Policy initiatives supporting student wellbeing in schools are urgently needed.