Lucy Bailey and Leoni Boyle on fostering wellbeing in schools | Working on Wellbeing S3E5

Beyond being academic institutions, schools should be places for optimism and holistic growth. By fostering wellbeing in schools, we can support young people not only academically, but also with social and mental health outcomes beyond their school years.

In this episode, host Sarah Cunningham sits down with child and adolescent wellbeing experts Lucy Bailey and Leoni Boyle. Lucy is CEO and founder of Bounce Forward, a charity dedicated to fostering psychological fitness in schools. Leoni, who joins us from the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, has recently contributed to the first-ever chapter on childhood and adolescence in the 2024 World Happiness Report, and co-authored the Wellbeing for Schoolteachers report, produced in collaboration with the International Baccalaureate Organisation.

Today’s conversation covers the predictive power of childhood wellbeing for later life outcomes, the profound impact of teacher wellbeing on student wellbeing and academic performance, and the challenges of introducing wellbeing-focused lessons into already jam-packed school schedules.

Tune in now and join this insightful discussion that reimagines education, highlighting the important role schools can play in nurturing the whole child, and not just their academic outcomes.

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We are all Working on our Wellbeing daily, but not everyone has access to the latest cutting-edge research into the science of wellbeing … until now. From our home at the World Wellbeing Movement, within the University of Oxford, we have created the Working on Wellbeing podcast so that you can be a fly on the wall during our conversations with the world’s leading wellbeing experts.