EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

children’s experiences.But does this mean a new form of league tablereporting, perhaps, on ‘contextual well-beingadded’? Not necessarily. It may be better if theparents, teachers and children at a school decidefor themselves, after advice, on the metrics theywill use to measure progress, with the role ofthe DfE merely to ensure that these metrics arerobust and that good processes are adopted. It istrue that schools will have to be held accountableif more attention is to be paid to well-being, butthat does not necessarily mean league tables orcentralised control. The accountability can itselfbe local. Indeed, given the value of co-productionand the importance of flourishing staff, rigidcentralised mechanisms may well be counterproductive.Having said this, we do believe that measuringthe well-being of children across the country –and establishing statistical relationships and, indue course, causal pathways between levels ofwell-being in different places and the objectiveconditions that apply in those places, includingschooling – will play a crucial part in makingchildren’s well-being a higher priority than itis now. There will be lessons for governmentpolicy-makers and individual schools from theresults of this analysis.And this may happen. The Office for NationalStatistics has started to measure adult subjectivewell-being and work is now under way to developeffective measures of children’s well-being. In duecourse, annual figures could be published on theproportion of children who are flourishing alongwith an analysis of what is driving movements inthese figures in different places. The task now isto ensure that these figures and this analysis arepublished, and that teachers, educationalists andpolicy-makers can learn from the results so as toimprove children’s well-being.Education for the good society | 29