‘I’m ready for the world’: Visualising Adolescent Wellbeing and Flourishing in a Music-Focused Secondary School

Creating school environments that support adolescent wellbeing is a global priority, yet the wellbeing of students with substantial musical engagement remains underexplored. This study examined how an Australian music-focused secondary school promotes adolescent wellbeing and flourishing. The school serves senior secondary students who had disengaged from mainstream education and positions music as the medium through which all learning occurs. Eight students aged 16 to 18 completed an individual draw and tell interview, producing eight visual narratives that were restoried and analysed deductively through the PERMA+H model of wellbeing (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment and Health). Findings reveal flourishing produced by whole-school design rather than chance: music operated as the integrative medium binding learning, relationships and identity; meaning arose through breadth of musical identity rather than specialisation; and accomplishment was distributed across performing and non-performing roles. Notably, no participant mentioned physical health, indicating that the added Health dimension registered almost entirely as psychological re-engagement and recovery. This article contributes a multimodal account of adolescents’ music-wellbeing literacy and offers practical PERMA+H strategies for learning music, arguing that wellbeing can be deliberately cultivated in music education, particularly for young people re-engaging with schooling.