Goals of Well‐Being in the Context of Finnish Comprehensive School Education

ABSTRACT One of the central aims of education and educational policies is to promote well‐being. Laws and norms oblige Finnish schools to formulate the goals for improving the well‐being of the entire school community in the documents guiding the school's operations. However, little is known about how the policy shows up in the school‐level goals related to well‐being, and how the ambiguous concept of well‐being has been understood. This article examines the well‐being discourses that emerged in the documents guiding the operations of Finnish comprehensive schools. We collected 379 school‐level documents from 20 municipalities and analysed the data using discourse analysis. As a result, four discourses were identified: the individual‐centred, competence‐related, collaboration‐related, and development‐supporting discourses. Our results indicated that well‐being at school is not an unambiguous or universal goal. Goals related to well‐being are often described at an abstract level. The trends in education policy affect the discourses that emerge and produce goals in the plans that partly follow the paradigms related to schools and society.