Written by Andrew Murray, Lumina Consulting.
Nearly 2.2 million Australians aged 15 and over are now living below what has been described as the “wellbeing poverty line”. It is a confronting figure. According to an analysis of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2025 General Social Survey, 9.7 per cent of Australians rated their overall satisfaction with life at four or below out of ten. In 2014, that figure was 4.8 per cent. In just over a decade, the proportion of Australians reporting very low life satisfaction has doubled.
I keep coming back to one question: what does this mean for those of us working in education? These statistics are not about people somewhere else. They are about the communities we know. They are our students, families, colleagues and school leaders. They are the people who arrive at our school gates each morning carrying pressures and experiences that may never appear in a strategic plan.
The data also points towards something that I think deserves our attention as educators: agency. Among Australians experiencing very low life satisfaction, only 15 per cent reported feeling that they had a say in important matters affecting their community. Among those reporting very high life satisfaction, that figure rose to 46 per cent.
We need to be careful with what we conclude from this. The data does not prove that having less voice causes lower life satisfaction. But the relationship between life satisfaction, agency, belonging and connection should make us pause. For me, this is where the conversation about flourishing becomes very real.
Flourishing is not simply about whether someone feels happy or gives their life a high satisfaction score. It is a broader question about whether people are able to live and work with meaning and purpose, experience relationships that sustain them, exercise agency and believe that they can contribute something of value to the lives of others.
In my work with school leaders, I often meet people who have not lost their commitment to education. Far from it. They still care deeply about their students, their staff and their communities. But sometimes I hear something else: a gradual erosion of energy, agency and meaning. The work still matters to them, but the conditions surrounding the work can make it increasingly difficult to flourish within it. That is an important distinction.
Schools cannot solve the cost-of-living crisis. We cannot fix housing affordability, inflation or the economic pressures experienced by families. Nor should we place responsibility for society’s wider problems onto already stretched teachers and principals. But schools are places where people spend a significant part of their lives. That gives us both a responsibility and an opportunity.
We can create places where young people are genuinely known. We can ask whether student voice means more than completing a survey once a year. We can provide opportunities for students to make meaningful decisions, contribute to their communities and experience that their presence matters. And we need to ask the same questions about the adults in our schools.
It is difficult to talk seriously about flourishing students without talking about flourishing staff. A principal operating in a state of chronic exhaustion cannot sustainably create the conditions for others to thrive. A teacher overwhelmed by workload may care deeply about students and still find it increasingly difficult to remain relationally present.
This is why individual wellbeing initiatives, while often valuable, are not enough. They cannot compensate for organisational conditions that repeatedly undermine people through excessive workload, limited agency, fractured relationships or a diminishing sense that their work has meaning.
The harder question, then, is not simply, “What wellbeing program should we introduce?” It is, “What are the conditions in this school that enable people to flourish?” Do our students feel that they belong here? Do our staff feel that their work has meaning? Do people have a genuine voice in decisions that affect them? Are our relationships strong enough to sustain us when things become difficult?
Perhaps the most challenging question for leaders is this: what are we doing, through our structures, relationships and everyday leadership practices, that enables people to flourish, and what are we doing that quietly gets in the way? These are not always comfortable questions, but I think they are necessary.
The latest Australian data does not tell us that schools are responsible for declining life satisfaction. That would be an unjustified leap. Nor does it suggest that schools can somehow solve the complex social and economic pressures affecting Australian communities. What it does remind us is that a significant number of people are struggling with how they experience their lives. And those realities do not stop at the school gate.
As educational leaders, perhaps our task is not to pretend that we can fix everything. It is to pay attention to what is within our influence. We can create communities where people are known, where they belong, where they have a voice, where their contribution matters and where relationships are not an optional extra but part of how the place works.
For me, that is where flourishing begins. And as we gather at the National Education Summit, perhaps the question worth carrying with us is this: If one in ten Australians is reporting very low life satisfaction, what are we doing in our schools, every day, to create the conditions in which people have a genuine opportunity to flourish?
Source: CathNews, “Australia’s ‘wellbeing poverty’ line reaches new highs,” 20 July 2026. The CathNews report draws on reporting by Patrick Commins for The Guardian.