ABSTRACT
Not unlike creativity discussed in the previous chapter, the phrase ‘health and well being’ has become a fashionable addition to our common vocabulary in the twenty-first century. Online searches quickly reveal a plethora of documents at central and local and government level and a number of commercial products (increasingly food) that refer to the phrase. Subjective measures of well being have remained stable in most modern societies for decades (Layard, 2006), so it is unclear exactly why this widespread adoption of the term has emerged so prominently within recent times. Reasons for its use may well be filtered down from a reaction to significant global publications such as the UNICEF ‘report card’ which ranked the UK in the bottom third of economically advanced nations for child well being (United Nations Children's Fund, 2007). It may also be a useful ‘catch all’ phrase for politicians and marketers as it is a phrase with seemingly no natural opposite and a phrase that when connected with other language is hard to disagree with, e.g., Do you want health and well being for your family? Yet, oddly, despite the unabated adoption of the phrase there remains significant ambiguity around the definition, usage and function of ‘health and well being’ in the public policy realm and in the wider world (Ereaut and Whiting, 2008). At a policy level it is the widespread adoption of the term within education which means it cannot be ignored and makes it worthy of attention here. Furthermore, what makes health and well being important to understand is that such terms are socio-cultural constructs and represent a set of meanings that are contested and can therefore change. This chapter will firstly examine what health and well being might mean in an educational sense, before moving on to the ways in which it has been operationalised in both wider policy and curriculum documents.
