The Future School for Comprehensive Well-Being (SchoolWell) project is a multidisciplinary consortium funded by the Strategic Research Council (SRC). Our main goal is to impact the core of Finnish education, everyday pedagogical activities, and to create solutions that support holistic well-being and learning in collaboration with children, young people, and the adults working with them.
Our future depends on the comprehensive well-being of children and young people: their readiness to build a good life, learn and create new things, realize their potential, and build thriving communities and an equitable society. On an individual level, the physical, psychological, and social well-being of a child or young person strongly predicts a positive life course. Early well-being problems, on the other hand, predispose individuals to negative developmental paths. Well-being, or the lack thereof, has far-reaching social, societal, and economic ripple effects not only for the individual but also for their close ones and society at large.
Although most Finnish children and young people are better off than ever, many face challenges in some aspect of well-being. For example, experiences of anxiety and loneliness are clearly on the rise. The spectrum of well-being problems is diverse, ranging from social exclusion to challenges in physical activity. Problems also tend to accumulate, with a small but growing group of children and young people experiencing issues in multiple areas of well-being. The disparities in well-being among children and young people are increasing at an accelerating rate, inevitably weakening their chances of growing into adults capable of leading meaningful lives and taking responsibility for a functioning society.
One of the most significant growth environments for children and adolescents is school, where all Finnish children and young people spend a significant part of their day. School provides a long-lasting environment not only for learning but also for promoting the holistic well-being of children and young people, with effects that can last for decades. Schools have the opportunity to contribute to solving well-being problems and, above all, to prevent them. Pedagogical solutions that guide school activities, learning, and interactions can, in addition to promoting learning, also enhance holistic well-being.
In the Future School for Comprehensive Well-Being (SchoolWell) project, we create research-based, sustainable, and impactful socio-pedagogical solutions to simultaneously promote learning and holistic well-being in schools. Our project aims to support positive educational and life trajectories for students and to promote equality by building a school community that supports comprehensive well-being.
In the first phase of our project, we focus on identifying common factors related to students' physical, psychological, and social well-being as well as learning. Additionally, we identify methods and interventions that have been proven effective in previous studies to support students' learning and well-being in school. We accomplish this phase using extensive national and regional population-based data, meta-analyses, and systematic literature reviews.
In the second phase, we collaborate with school professionals and students to create socio-pedagogical solutions that support holistic well-being and learning, based on the findings from the first phase. Hundreds of fifth and seventh-grade students from ten participating schools across Finland will be involved in the activities. The experimentation and development of interventions will last for over a school year. Our goal is to find sustainable solutions that integrate into the daily life of schools, align with the core mission of schools, and are applicable to all Finnish schools. In this phase of the research, our joint meetings with researchers, schools, and key stakeholders play a particularly important role. At the same time, we collect research data on the content, applicability, and effectiveness of the interventions using the indicators selected in the first phase.
In the third phase, we utilize previously collected data. We focus particularly on understanding disparities in student well-being, identifying key processes and risk groups, and recognizing effective models that buffer against differentiated development.
In the fourth phase, we monitor the longitudinal effects of school interventions using scientific research methods. Our main goal is to identify the most effective socio-pedagogical practices and integrate them into the daily life of Finnish schools.
We conduct consortium interaction and stakeholder collaboration throughout the entire project. Through these efforts, we promote dialogue between research and practice with the aim of establishing a research-based ecosystem of holistic well-being in Finnish schools.