How’s life? OECD policy and the mainstreaming, mainframing and mainlining of educational well-being

The quest for ‘well-being’ is a notable aspect of recent education policy (OECD 2018; 2019; 2025), but it is not immune to critical analysis. This paper examines the way well-being is promoted in education policy, notably in the OECD’s ‘Teaching Compass“and ”How’s Life?’ database. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between lives and life, I critique the discursive construction of well-being and life in OECD policy and question its claims about the affective management of learning. I show how the OECD misconstrues learning lives via processes of mainstreaming, mainframing and ultimately mainlining well-being. The result is a diminished form of agency and engagement with education, heralded by policy which implies a radical truncation of the possibilities of life itself, especially for learners’ future well-being.