Conference Program

Student wellbeing became a major concern during the 2020 pandemic. Increasing evidence of illbeing (anxiety, school disengagement, self-harm, etc.), particularly among adolescents, generated urgency in public discourse. International actors developed policies to promote wellbeing in education, concerned with its consequences on learning and academic success. This could have been an opportunity to bring together different epistemologies on emotion and wellbeing at school, from a more critical and less western-centric perspective (Jiang, Saito, Zhang & Waterhouse, 2024). Instead, a conception of individual wellbeing and socio-emotional intelligence, that does not equally contemplate its structural dimensions (Fernández, 2018), became standardized in education.

This has particular implications for school systems governed by right-wing and neoliberal administrations, as in Madrid, Spain. Decades of privatization, marketization and school segregation under an “individual freedom” brand, mark the public education landscape of this European region. National reforms in 2020–2021 incorporated new measures, including the creation of a wellbeing coordinator role within schools and the implementation of large-scale teacher training on mental health. Examining how these institutional policies and conceptions of student wellbeing are enacted and/or resisted within schools reveals differences in institutional habitus, with contextualized dispositions towards attending to student emotions (Reay, 2015).

Based on semi-structured interviews with 60 school leaders, counsellors and teachers from five public secondary schools in Madrid, this paper provides discursive and thematic analysis to understand conceptions, practices and emotional norms, or regimes, around student wellbeing. It aims to answer how, why and under what conditions student wellbeing is conceptualized and addressed by public secondary education under this international “wellbeing turn”. Selected schools have diverse student compositions in terms of socioeconomic and migrant background, hence the study also explores structural inequalities that intersect with schools' approaches towards student wellbeing.

Critical theories in the sociology of affect and emotion allow us to identify emotional registers, norms and doxa at school (Threadgold, 2020; Ahmed, 2004). These elements are socially constructed and reproduced through discourses and practices, legitimizing some emotional registers while excluding or disciplining others (Abramowski, 2024). These dynamics constitute particular emotional “regimes” that are part of a school’s institutional habitus (Ibid; Reay, 2004). Understanding how schools conceptualize emotions and wellbeing, and how these approaches are enacted by adults at school, has important implications for different students, especially those belonging to working-class, migrant and/or ethnic minorities (Reay, 2025). Consequently, the present study shows that emotional school regimes affect not only how student wellbeing is addressed, but also whose wellbeing and emotional worlds are legitimized, identifying inherent affective inequalities (Nobile & Tarabini, 2025; Lynch & Baker, 2005).

This paper brings forward implications for policymaking and school practice in a neoliberal education scenario, where student wellbeing is mainly understood as an individual responsibility to be regulated through emotional management, as a marketable capability (Lynch, Baker, Cantillon & Walsh, 2009), while undermining its structural roots (racism, poverty, gender inequality, etc.). This work also aims to contribute to a growing body of critical research on emotion and wellbeing at school, centering urgent questions of emotional/affective inequality in education.