Can you teach happiness?

Steph Davies thinks so. And you might just improve your SATs results at the same time...

Whenever working with adults in schools or workplaces I often ask the question, “What do you want for your children when they grow up?” The answers are always the same: love, happiness, confidence, health, safety, motivation, self-sufficiency, and positive relationships.

So my next question is where in the curriculum have the skills that will allow children to achieve these goals been embedded?

Schools have used emotional intelligence toolkits for a number of years and there have been a collection of reported benefits, including a fall in the level of exclusions, improved attendance levels and, most importantly, a boost in the individual’s ability to learn, engage and achieve. However, emotional intelligence is not compulsory in schools and there is no standardised way of teaching it. 

The government is already working towards understanding the impact of improved wellbeing and happiness with its ONS wellbeing project, The Happiness Survey. The results show that ethnicity, socio-economic factors and geography all have an influence on happiness and wellbeing. And although the results can be seen as skewed because the survey was conducted during the recession, the underlying reason for conducting it – that GDP is not, by itself, a satisfactory way to measure Britain’s progress – is sound.

In the last 15 years, there have been many studies into positive psychology and its impact on wellbeing and productivity. There is a growing body of research that suggests happy people are more productive, healthier and earn more. One study by Professor Andrew Oswald at the University of Warwick showed how children’s emotional development in the early years has a huge impact on aspirations and choices in later life. Oswald found that children who were happier were more likely to earn more by the time they reached 30. On a macro scale, a happier population is healthier and more productive, which in turns leads to an improved economy and less strains on the healthcare system.

So how do we increase happiness?

From my own perspective, I believe happiness should be an easy-to-learn life skill that can be developed at school. But in order to teach it, we first must understand what it is – or at least its components.

In 2012, my company, Laughology, began a 10-week pilot project with St Matthew’s Primary School in Luton. The aim was to help pupils improve their SATs. The school had previously been underachieving, not having reached the national average at Level 4 in over seven years. While teachers continued to work with pupils on their academic subjects, Laughology developed and delivered a programme aimed at helping the children involved improve their key happiness skills. These were identified as confidence, the ability to achieve and recognise personal success, building and sustaining positive relationships, developing coping skills, and having and giving support. Our hypotheses was that embedding these components into the lives of children and teachers would help them feel happier, more positive and more focused. The results made a compelling case for the continued development of such programmes.

By the end of primary school, the SATS results in maths and English of all of the 88 Year 6 children who participated in the programme were up by 20 per cent on the previous year, by far the best results the school has achieved in recent years. It reached the national average of 60 per cent for Level 4 for the first time since 2006. The school’s headteacher and her colleagues were in no doubt that a major factor in this result was the programme’s role in developing children’s self-belief and desire to do better.

The one fact we need to remember is that we are never going to be happy all of the time. Life throws up challenges and difficulties on a daily basis and the trick is not to ignore or walk away from these, but to face them head on with the right tools and attitude. Facing dilemmas in your life and getting through them is, in part, what makes us who we are – it builds our character and enables us to learn from mistakes. Without sadness, you can’t have happiness; the two go hand in hand like yin and yang. However, we are all entitled to happiness, no matter what our background, and just as this country has enabled us to be educated, we should be enabled to be happy.