Governing teacher well-being in international policy discourse: Problem representation, accountability, and the individualisation of care

Abstract

Teacher well-being has become a prominent concern in contemporary education policy, yet it is rarely treated as a structural or ethical responsibility in its own right. Instead, it is frequently mobilised instrumentally through its assumed effects on performance, retention, and system efficiency. This article examines how teacher well-being is constituted as a policy problem within internationally circulating education policy discourse. Drawing on Bacchi’s What's the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) approach, and informed by White's relational conceptualisation of well-being, it develops an interpretive policy analysis of influential texts through which it is made visible and governed across contexts. The analysis shows that well-being is predominantly represented as an individual responsibility, to be secured through resilience, self-regulation, and emotional self-management, rather than as a condition shaped by organisational and material arrangements. This framing is reinforced through governance technologies, including accountability frameworks, performance metrics, and well-being agendas, which render it governable as an individual attribute while redistributing responsibility across the system, positioning teachers as self-regulating subjects and constraining leaders’ capacity to address structural conditions. These representations moralise stress, intensify self-surveillance, and normalise forms of harm. Presenteeism is positioned as a key analytical concept, revealing how harm can remain insufficiently problematised when institutional performance appears uninterrupted.