Analyzing Drawings to Explore children’s Concepts of an Ideal School: Implications for the Improvement of children’s Well-Being at School Kevin Simoes Loureiro 1 & Alyssa Grecu 2 & Frederick de Moll 2 & Andreas Hadjar 2 Accepted: 25 November 2019/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract Because not much is known about children’ s subjective well-being (SWB) in educa- tional spaces, our objective was to analyze children’ s drawings of their ideal school environment, emphasizing the importance of obtaining the children’ s perspective. To do so, we analyzed Luxembourgish primary school children’ s drawings (n = 150; age 10) using visual grounded theory methodology. The results were centered on 10 main underlying themes that indicated children’ s conceptualizations of their dream school in which particular attention was paid to the design of the school buildings, playgrounds, and classrooms. Children’ s written inputs showed the boundaries of visual expression, as they mentioned different desires beyond those conveyed by the drawings. In addition to fancy aesthetics of the school environment, material conditions such as playground facilities were found to be a significant part of the children’ s dream schools. Our analyses offer meaningful insights into children’ s perceptions of an educational envi- ronment that fosters well-being, thereby functioning as a blueprint for adults’ efforts to improve schools in a more child-friendly manner. Keywords Children’ s drawings . Primary school . Educational spaces . Subjective well- being . Qualitative methods Child Indicators Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-019-09705-8 * Kevin Simoes Loureiro kevin.simoes@uni.lu Alyssa Grecu alyssa.grecu@uni.lu Frederick de Moll frederick.demoll@uni.lu Andreas Hadjar andreas.hadjar@uni.lu Extended author information available on the last page of the article