The Co-option and Commodification of ‘Mental Health and Wellbeing’ in Elite Schooling

The field of elite schooling is subject to neoliberal rationalities, governed by the forces of competition, choice and marketisation. Schools often engage in promotional strategies on their websites and in prospectuses to appeal to upper/middle-class ‘clientele’. This article demonstrates the ways in which elite schools in England are seeking to gain positional advantage through mobilising discourse and strategies relating to mental health and wellbeing . Drawing on the concept of emotional capital, we conduct a critical reading of 30 elite schools’ online marketing practices. We demonstrate how ‘good’ mental health as discursive-affective formation becomes commodified and sellable within promotional materials, affording elite schools a sense of ‘value-addedness’. In doing so, we trouble the increasingly dominant medicalised and psychologised gaze of mental health in compulsory schooling, and draw new implications for sociological understandings of the reproduction of social class inequalities in education.