Holistically healthy humans: championing mental and physical wellbeing in education

Humans are at the heart of education and learning environments are active organisms. From an ecosystems perspective, each setting has unique dynamically interacting elements—students, educators, policies, resources, and wider community—with the potential to create optimal conditions for humans to learn, be healthy and thrive. The promotion of good health and wellbeing in education was declared a universal strategic goal by the United Nations in their 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015). Certainly, wellbeing is seen as both a requirement for learning and a product of a well-functioning education system. Holistic wellbeing is conceptualized as a multi-dimensional construct encompassing physical and mental health and socio-emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Existing literature suggests the interconnectivity of these elements and their combined contribution to optimal human wellness (Mullins-Owens, 2016). A healthy settings framework (World Health Organisation, 2025) envisages health as something created and experienced by people within the spaces of their everyday life, including heath promoting schools (HPS), and provides a relevant context to explore our Research Topic. In the current climate both global and local factors pose significant challenges for schools and other learning settings, and health and wellbeing concerns are growing. In the UK, school leaders are grappling with funding deficits alongside a teacher recruitment and retention crisis (McLean et al., 2024); while the education workforce from early years to higher education (HE) face unprecedented strain with high levels of stress and burnout common (Jayman et al., 2022; Solvason et al., 2025). Nonetheless, education settings are uniquely positioned to promote, nurture, and support holistic wellbeing, and our Research Topic brings together international research to investigate this central theme from a broad perspective. There is a strong emphasis on salutogenic approaches that focus on strengthening social and individual resources and harnessing these assets to help create holistically healthy education ecosystems in which everyone can thrive.