The student voice is growing rapidly in education, driving many educational initiatives and policies as well as research. The voice of students with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties, however, is one of the least heard, with relatively few studies that sought to capture the voice of these students in an authentic and emancipatory way. This paper reviews a number of small‐scale qualitative studies that sought the views of secondary school students with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties in Malta. Five main themes were identified, namely poor relationships with teachers, victimisation, a sense of oppression and powerlessness, unconnected learning experiences, and exclusion and stigmatisation. The paper concludes with various suggestions on how the voice of these students may become more powerful and authentic and serve as an emancipatory experience.

As children and young people today face ever increasing social, emotional and mental health challenges, schools, as one of the primary systems in children’s lives, are called to broaden their agenda and help to address these challenges. This paper discusses the evaluation of a school-based, universal mental health promotion programme developed recently for the European context. The programme provides a universal curriculum from early years to high school, aiming to promote social and emotional learning and resilience and prevent social, emotional, and behavioural problems in children and adolescents. A total of 7,789 students (and their teachers and parents) from kindergarten to high school across 6 countries in Europe were recruited from 434 classrooms in 124 schools, making use of cluster sampling. A quasi-experimental longitudinal design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme on students’ outcomes by comparing the groups’ outcomes within times (pre-test vs. post-test) and between groups (experimental vs. control group). A total of 779 classroom teachers completed pre-and-post scales measuring students’ social and emotional learning, mental health and academic achievement. Results indicate that the experimental group had significantly larger increase in social and emotional competence and prosocial behaviour, and a decrease in mental health issues (externalising and internalising problems). No significant impact was found for academic outcomes. The findings are discussed in view of the limitations of the study and areas for further research.

A caring school community can enhance whole-school wellbeing including the wellbeing of school staff, which directly impacts on student academic, social and emotional wellbeing. This study firstly examines the validity and reliability of a proposed whole-school staff wellbeing evaluation tool which uses a set of whole-school wellbeing indicators to identify strengths and areas for improvement within the school environment which may be impacting on staff wellbeing. Secondly, the association between factors found within the whole-school staff wellbeing tool with staff self-reported mental health are examined, and finally, the influence of person characteristics and role of factors on perceived whole-school staff wellbeing are determined. Cross-sectional data were collected from 801 school staff from six non-government schools in Australia as part of the School Staff Wellbeing Project. Results confirmed and validated the hypothesised structure of the whole-school staff wellbeing evaluation tool with staff relationships (leadership, staff), staff engagement (active, supported), staff emotional wellbeing (supported through policies and opportunities) and school climate (culture and values) found to be significant predictors of mental health. Prioritising resources to building supportive staff relationships, school climate, and providing opportunities to promote staff emotional wellbeing, were found to have the greatest impact on staff mental health. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, role, and length of time working in schools predicted perceptions of the whole-school’s general wellbeing. The whole-school staff wellbeing evaluation tool provides a useful screening and self-evaluation measure to identify whole-school staff wellbeing strengths and areas for improvement in staff wellbeing.

Student engagement research in university students has been scarce, despite its major positive role on performance, degree completion and mental health. Social and emotional competencies, which are currently called twenty-first-century skills, exert some impact on student engagement in youth. Since engagement is cultural-sensitive, individual (social and emotional competencies) and cross-cultural (human developmental index and unemployment rate) characteristics were examined in association with student engagement in youth. This study included 2,092 participants from nine countries/regions, aged between 17 and 27 years (M = 21.52, SD = 2.27), mostly cisgender woman (n = 1,035, 68.7%) and undergraduate (n = 1,401, 96.2%). Data were collected using a cross-sectional online survey that included the Student Engagement Scale, the Emotional Skills and Competence Questionnaire, and the prosocial behaviour/resources subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Multilevel-models showed that social and emotional competencies were relevant predictors of student engagement independently of the country-level variables. Moreover, student engagement varied with country/region human development and unemployment rate, with students from higher developed countries/regions and lowered unemployment reporting lower engagement. This study reinforces the need to implement evidence-based social and emotional learning programmes in universities worldwide, as well as public policies that can influence engagement and protect youth.

This paper discusses the findings and implications of a semi-randomised control trial study on the effectiveness of circle time (CT) on primary school students’ social and emotional learning, as well as classroom teachers’ and students’ experience of CT. A social and emotional learning programme was delivered through CT by trained classroom teachers across the years in one primary school, with other classrooms serving as control groups. The classroom teachers completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) at pre- and post-intervention, while the CT teachers also completed a questionnaire on their experience of implementing CT in the classroom. The CT students also completed a questionnaire on their own experience of CT. The SDQ scores suggest that CT students showed less internalised difficulties when compared to their control peers, while the qualitative data from both teachers and students suggest that the CT students also exhibited less behaviour problems and more prosocial behaviour. The study identifies various strengths and weaknesses of the programme and makes recommendations on how it could be organised more effectively in the classroom. The paper concludes that rather than taking CT as the default option for nurturing such values as student empowerment, inclusion and equity, there is a need for further rigorous studies on the impact of CT not only on students’ social and emotional learning and behaviour but also on the classroom relationships and climate.

Educational resilience has received considerable attention in the literature in the past three decades, with particular reference to indicated and selective interventions. This paper construes resilience within a generalist, universal perspective and examines how classrooms may serve as protective and competence‐enhancing contexts for all their students. Various processes, such as caring relationships, active engagement, inclusion, collaboration, positive beliefs and expectations, and recognition, were identified in a naturalist study of Maltese primary school classrooms operating as optimal learning environments. The study suggests that classrooms, which organize themselves as caring, inclusive and learning and pro‐social centred communities, may operate as protective and competence‐enhancing contexts for all their students.