Happy Schools and Communities: Supporting Adolescents’ Wellbeing in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Initiatives to assess and promote adolescents’ wellbeing are proliferating worldwide. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been implementing pioneering wellbeing agendas at the national and emirate levels for some years. However, these have barely been driven by local evidence, which remains almost nonexistent in the area of adolescent wellbeing. In the absence of local evidence, schools and other decision-makers are forced to rely on evidence from studies conducted in altogether different sociocultural contexts. Yet, the unique characteristics of the nation demand evidence-based policymaking approaches that are sensitive to local issues and the diverse socio-demographic profile of its population. The following policy paper supports this endeavor by analyzing data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 to provide the first detailed overview of levels and drivers of adolescents’ wellbeing in the UAE. This baseline assessment provides valuable insights that schools, education authorities, and other stakeholders can use to inform decisions on how to support adolescents’ wellbeing. This policy paper makes specific recommendations and calls for a change in the nation’s wellbeing policy approach to facilitate systematic data collection and analysis at the national, emirate, and school levels and ensure that the emerging evidence is used to drive positive change.