Education policy and students' happiness and mental health from a comparative perspective

The finding that beyond a certain level increases in GDP do not translate into greater happiness (Easterlin 1974, Layard 2006) has triggered a growing academic and policy interest in SWB over the last four decades (Diener et al. 1999; Diener et al 2018). In 2009, the highly influential report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (Stiglitz 2009) advised that social progress should be assessed using SWB indicators. Since then, governments in many countries have promoted the collection and analysis of SWB data to assess progress in our societies. At the national level, in the United Kingdom (UK), the Office for National Statistics has created a programme to measure national well-being for adults (ONS 2016), young people (ONS 2014b) and children (ONS 2014a), including subjective measures of well-being. Compared to adults, interest in child SWB is a more recent phenomenon and its study has been traditionally hindered by limited data availability. However, this has changed over the last decade and we have just started to learn about the links between public policy and children's SWB.
Despite the increasing academic and policy interest in SWB, the questions of whether and how public policy can promote children's SWB remain understudied. My PhD thesis aimed to reduce this gap by studying the association between education policy and students' SWB using data from the PISA 2015 study, which collected for the first time in PISA data on students' SWB -in particular, on overall life satisfaction (LS). I investigated this question by using advanced quantitative methods -mainly multilevel regression analysis- to study the LS of 15-year-old students in 33 countries. Findings suggest that education policy and practice can make a difference in shaping students' SWB. In particular, my PhD thesis presents analysis demonstrating an association between several education policy-relevant factors and students' LS, which is especially prominent -and observed in almost all countries- for schoolwork-related anxiety, bullying and parents' emotional support in relation to school. Results also indicate that schools may play an important role in shaping students' LS. In addition, in many countries, the links between schools and education policy and students' LS differ for girls and boys and for students of different socio-economic status. Finally, in all the analyses described above, there are significant differences across countries. Furthermore, towards the end of my PhD, I conducted an exploratory analysis of data from PISA 2018 which reveals a worldwide decline in students' LS since 2015 in almost all participating countries, particularly among girls, and the largest decline is by far observed in the UK.
This fellowship will focus on maximising the academic and policy impact of my research through publications and engagement and dissemination activities and it will also be oriented to help me prepare for the next stage in my academic career by developing grant proposals, accessing relevant training and gaining some teaching experience. As part of the fellowship, I will conduct 3 new studies building on my PhD work. These will address some of the data limitations of PISA 2015, which have recently been overcome in PISA 2018 and PISA for Development. These new studies will also broaden the scope of my PhD research to fill some important gaps in the literature. New research will include a study in the context of the UK, a comparative study focusing on students' SWB in low-income countries and a comparative study in middle- and high-income countries exploring a wider range of subjective and psychological well-being outcomes, including mental health outcomes.
Overall, this work makes key contributions to our understanding of whether and how children's SWB can be influenced by schools and education policy, supporting calls that education policy should also be assessed in terms of its impact in children's SWB.