When wellbeing goes to school: exploring the enactment of wellbeing in Junior Cycle in Ireland
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Date
2026-07-29
Authors
McCormack, Orla
McGarr, Oliver
Hennessy, Jennifer
Neary, Aoife
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Abstract
Many education systems have placed a focus on student wellbeing, as issues relating to physical, mental, emotional and social wellbeing of young people become increasingly evident. Wellbeing was introduced as a dedicated area of learning into lower second level schooling in Ireland (Junior Cycle, ages 12–15 years) through the introduction of 400 hours of timetabled engagement within the Framework for Junior Cycle. Drawing on student surveys (n = 3612) and focus groups (n = 432) as well as teacher (n = 136), principal (n = 32) and parent (n = 60) interviews from a larger national four-year NCCA-funded longitudinal study, this paper explores how participants experienced the enactment of Wellbeing in Irish schools. The study found that the enactment of Wellbeing was influenced by four inter-related issues: (i) Wellbeing was not always perceived and experienced as something that was valued within Junior Cycle; (ii) Wellbeing was understood and experienced in a narrow way; (iii) Wellbeing was deemed to cause additional stress for students and (iv) Assessment continued to remain the dominant concern for students and staff. The paper considers the implications of the findings for the positioning and enactment of wellbeing within assessment-driven education systems.
Description
© 2026, the Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med-ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Keywords
Assessment , Curriculum , Enactment , Junior Cycle , Wellbeing , [Education] , Education
Citation
McCormack, O., McGarr, O., Hennessy, J. and Neary, A. (2026) 'When wellbeing goes to school: exploring the enactment of wellbeing in Junior Cycle in Ireland', Journal of Curriculum Studies, pp. 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2026.2710695
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