Digital Wellbeing in Schools: What the EU's 2025 Policy Report Reveals

If your school’s phone policy is still one line in the student handbook, the EU just spent 2025 explaining why that’s no longer enough. For years, “digital wellbeing” in schools has meant a paragraph buried inside a broader digital-skills or online-safety policy — a nod to screen time, not a plan for it. That is changing at the EU level. In 2025, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) published Promoting wellbeing in digital education, a report built on practice from 12 schools across four EU countries, that formalizes wellbeing into a named “model of emerging practices for wellbeing in digital education” — explicitly tied to the EU’s 2030 Roadmap on digital education and skills.

That is a meaningful shift in framing, not a measured outcome. The evidence behind it is descriptive and policy-based — practice reviews, national surveys, practitioner-perception data — not a controlled study proving that any specific practice improves student wellbeing. Worth saying once, plainly, before going further: everything below describes what European institutions are now prioritizing and recommending, not what has been proven to work. With that established, here is what the pattern across this and five related 2025 EU sources actually shows, and what it means for how schools should be thinking about technology.

From side note to named pillar

The JRC report doesn’t stand alone. It builds on the 2022 EU Council conclusions and the Digital Education Action Plan 2021–2027, and it lands alongside a cluster of other 2025 EU publications treating digital wellbeing the same way: as a distinct policy category with its own curriculum guidance, training requirements, and monitoring indicators — not a subclause of general digital-skills or e-safety policy.

The JRC report itself identifies seven conclusions for effective wellbeing practice: integrated policies, balanced technology use, technology-design considerations, addressing the digital divide, whole-school approaches, stakeholder collaboration, and continuous research. Three of those — balanced use, whole-school integration, and named wellbeing policy — recur across the other sources closely enough to read as the emerging core of what “good” digital education now means in EU policy circles.

Confirming this isn’t a one-off framing choice: the European School Education Platform’s June 2025 guidance defines digital wellbeing operationally — online habits, time online, activity types, and interaction quality — under the same Digital Education Action Plan. And a European Schoolnet survey of 20 national education systems, conducted January–April 2025, found that while dedicated national policies specifically on digital wellbeing are still emerging, the topic is already widely woven into curricula — digital citizenship, media literacy, psychosocial health — across primary and secondary levels, and every participating country now offers some teacher training on it, though scope and mandatory status vary widely.

That survey is also useful for what it flags as a gap. Early childhood education comes up repeatedly as the level where digital-wellbeing policy and training lag furthest behind — a detail that matters for any school running from nursery through secondary, since a whole-school policy modeled only on secondary norms will likely under-serve its youngest classrooms. The survey’s method — an online questionnaire plus bilateral exchanges directly with national education authorities across 20 systems — makes it one of the more direct policy-level readings available, even though, like every source here, it captures declared policy and practitioner perception rather than measured student outcomes.

What “digital wellbeing” actually covers in EU policy

It is broader than screen-time limits. The Commission’s own framing spans four dimensions: how much time students spend online, what they’re doing while there, the quality of their digital interactions, and the habits they carry into and out of school. This lines up with the DigComp Digital Competence Framework, where digital health and wellbeing is one of 21 named core competences citizens are expected to develop — a positioning first documented in a late-2023 report and not contradicted by any of the 2025 publications cited here, even though none of them revisits DigComp specifically — not an add-on to digital literacy, but a formal component of it.

Practitioner sentiment backs the direction of travel, even if it isn’t proof of outcomes. In the European School Education Platform’s 2025 survey, 56% of respondents said mobile phones negatively affect pupil wellbeing, 62% believed restricting phones would increase face-to-face interaction, and 41% thought restrictions would reduce cyberbullying. Those are opinions from educators, not measured effects — worth reading as a signal of where the field’s attention is, not as evidence that restriction policies deliver those outcomes.

The direction of the policy conversation matters too. A 2025 Save the Children UK and Vodafone Foundation study across eight European countries — Click, Scroll, Connect – and Balance (Albania, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey, UK) — argues explicitly for moving past a harm-only framing toward “safe, rights-based and empowering digital engagement.” The study also documents unequal digital access and disproportionate exposure to harms like algorithmic bias and AI-generated abuse material among girls, LGBTQIA+ youth, children with disabilities, and minority students — a reminder that “balance,” not blanket restriction, is the emerging European framing, and that wellbeing practice needs to account for which students are actually at higher risk, including how a school’s own safety and reporting tools are set up to catch those harms.

Meanwhile, the European Parliamentary Research Service situates all of this inside a wider digital-skills gap: ICILS 2023 data showed 43% of EU eighth-graders still lack basic digital skills against a 2030 target of under 15%. Wellbeing is one strand of a digital-education agenda that, EU-wide, still has considerable ground to cover.

Balanced use is not the only factor

Wellbeing framing is not the only variable EU researchers point to when explaining why some digital classrooms function better than others. A 2025 OECD policy paper, drawing on PISA 2022 data, points to teacher professional standards, workload, and technical support as decisive levers for effective digital-resource integration — the paper doesn’t engage with wellbeing framing at all, a reminder that it’s addressing a separate policy lever entirely. Separately, an Interreg Europe brief highlights the digital divide — connectivity, funding, and skills gaps — as a constraint in its own right, noting nearly half of EU adults still lack basic digital skills. Both are credible, EU-funded, independent explanations that compete with the wellbeing-pillar narrative. A school with strong wellbeing policy but an undertrained staff or unreliable connectivity is not automatically a well-functioning digital classroom.

What this means day to day

The JRC’s seven conclusions are policy language. Translated into practice, they point toward a few concrete habits — not prescriptions from any named school, since no source in this research names individual classrooms, but reasonable illustrations of what “balanced use” and “whole-school integration” could look like operationally.

In practice, this could look like:

• Quiet window: a standing “low-notification window” — say, a 45-minute block twice a week where the family communication app is muted for non-urgent messages, reserved for deep-work or offline activities, with the exception clearly signposted for emergencies.
• Termly pulse survey: a two-question check sent to parents and older students through the school’s existing messaging channel — “How connected did you feel to your child’s/your school life this term?” and “Did digital tools help or add friction?” — reviewed by the whole-school team, not just the IT lead, in line with the JRC’s stakeholder-collaboration conclusion.
• Onboarding message: a short, mandatory message sent to new families in their first week — three sentences, one link — explaining what channels the school uses, how often, and how to adjust notification frequency, directly addressing the “technology-design considerations” conclusion about giving users control over their own exposure.

Each one maps directly to a JRC conclusion, which is what makes them a reasonable place for a whole-school team to start rather than wait for a fuller evidence base.

Where this leaves school administrators

Two things can be true at once: EU institutions are now treating digital wellbeing as core policy, not an afterthought, and the practices that follow from that are still mostly recommendations rather than validated interventions. For an administrator running a school, that argues for adopting the direction — balanced use, whole-school ownership, design that gives families control — while staying honest that “wellbeing-branded” doesn’t automatically mean “proven effective,” and while not neglecting the teacher-training and connectivity fundamentals the OECD and Interreg Europe research flags as equally decisive.

Operationally, this comes down to one requirement: the tools schools use for parent and student communication need to support balance by design — configurable notification windows, clear opt-in/opt-out controls, and reporting that shows how communication volume and timing actually behave, not just whether messages were delivered. That’s the baseline the JRC’s “technology-design considerations” conclusion is gesturing at, whatever platform a school runs on.

It’s also a lower-cost starting point than it might sound. None of the seven JRC conclusions require new headcount or a curriculum overhaul before a school can start. A quiet-hours setting, a termly pulse survey, and a clearer onboarding message are configuration and communication decisions, not capital projects — which makes them a reasonable first move even for schools still working through the connectivity and staff-training gaps the OECD and Interreg Europe research describes as the harder, slower fixes.

BeeNet is one implementation path for that requirement — its messaging and notifications tools let schools set quiet hours, separate urgent from routine communication, and give families visibility into what’s being sent and when, rather than defaulting to always-on alerts. It isn’t the only way to meet the EU’s emerging wellbeing-by-design standard, but it is a concrete way to start.

The EU has moved digital wellbeing from a footnote to a named pillar. The research on what specifically works inside that pillar is still being written. For schools deciding how to communicate with families day to day, the question isn’t whether digital wellbeing belongs in that decision — the policy signal on that is now clear — it’s when the school’s own tools and habits catch up to it.

References

1. Joint Research Centre, European Commission with Visionary Analytics. “Promoting wellbeing in digital education.” 2025. https://school-education.ec.europa.eu/en/discover/publications/promoting-wellbeing-digital-education
2. European School Education Platform, European Commission. “Developing digital wellbeing in classrooms.” June 13, 2025. https://school-education.ec.europa.eu/en/discover/news/developing-digital-wellbeing-classrooms
3. Andronikidis, Konstantinos (European Schoolnet), eds. Blamire, Roger; Wastiau, Patricia. “Agile Collection of Information, Vol. 5 — Well-being in digital environment in school.” May 2025. https://www.eun.org/documents/411753/12884590/Agile+collection+of+Information+vol.5.pdf
4. Binder, Krisztina. European Parliamentary Research Service. “Growing focus on digital skills.” March 4, 2025. https://epthinktank.eu/2025/03/04/growing-focus-on-digital-skills/
5. ALL DIGITAL / Lifelong Learning Platform, via EPALE, European Commission. “Digital Well-Being in Education.” Published March 12, 2024 (underlying report dated December 20, 2023). https://epale.ec.europa.eu/en/resource-centre/content/digital-well-being-education
6. DeMarco, Jeffrey; Ritz, Daniela; Sandall, Michelle. Save the Children UK with Vodafone Foundation. “Click, Scroll, Connect – and Balance: Children’s Digital Wellbeing in Educational Contexts Across Europe.” 2025. https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/click-scroll-connect-and-balance-childrens-digital-wellbeing-in-educational-contexts-across-europe-2025
7. Bottura, Beatrice; Boeskens, Luka. OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. “Teacher policies to support the use of digital resources in the classroom.” OECD Education Policy Perspectives No. 128. September 2025. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/09/teacher-policies-to-support-the-use-of-digital-resources-in-the-classroom_91045dd6/d16e9614-en.pdf
8. Varisco, Laura; Pattinson, Marc. Interreg Europe Policy Learning Platform. “Bridging the digital divide — Policy Brief.” August 2025. https://www.interregeurope.eu/sites/default/files/2025-08/Policy%20brief%20on%20bridging%20the%20digital%20divide.pdf