Facets of primary and secondary school students' wellbeing during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative analysis of Austrian and Italian educational policy

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the limits of current social and educational structures. In most countries, COVID-19 has compromised the wellbeing of students, but also of their families and teachers. During the first wave of the pandemic, school systems all over the world had to respond quickly and appropriately to the systemic shock it represented, and countries put a variety of different policy measures in place to tackle its extensive impact. The theoretical framework adopted in this paper is a critical perspective and the policy framework is the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); it provides a qualitative analysis of selected educational policies deployed by Italy and Austria to support the wellbeing of school pupils. The two countries deployed different education governance and emergency management strategies, in particular during the first wave of the pandemic. We applied our theoretical and policy frameworks to qualitative content analysis of educational policy documents from February to the end of August 2020, aiming to evaluate the responses to crisis of different education systems and potentially to support their improvement. The overall research question was: How did educational policies in Italy and Austria support students' wellbeing during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic? The results confirm that the Italian and Austrian systems had different strategies to support wellbeing and put different initiatives in place. However, educational policies in both countries, and especially Italy, had a stronger focus on the physical wellbeing of individual students during the period under study, and tended to neglect social wellbeing. The paper concludes by reflecting on the opportunities presented by this emergency for school systems to position wellbeing (in the broader sense of eudaimonic wellbeing) at the centre of educational policy