Why the world needs “Happy Schools”
As a direct response to the Transforming Education Summit in 2022, UNESCO’s global Happy Schools Initiative advocates for a transformative reform of education and a paradigm shift to put happiness at the core of education policy and practice.
Grounded in both science and philosophy, it recognizes happiness as both a means to and a goal of quality learning. Academic excellence and happiness are not mutually exclusive. Happiness can be a key lever for enhancing learning experiences and outcomes.
The initiative urges education authorities to prioritize happiness in education and scale up joyful learning practices from schools to policy levels, guided by UNESCO's global Happy Schools framework. The model comprises four pillars — people, process, place, and principles — and 12 high-level criteria for integrating happiness into education systems.
Key messages: the nexus of happiness and learning
- Growing global demands: The Happy Schools Initiative is receiving growing interest from policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and other key stakeholders from both low- and high-income countries due to global declines in both learning and well-being.
- Focus on education policy and planning: Happiness and well-being activities cannot be effectively implemented at scale without being integrated into education policies and plans. UNESCO emphasizes this important dimension to ensure systemic changes towards happy teaching and learning.
- Holistic approach to happiness and well-being in and for education: To support systemic changes, the Happy Schools initiative serves as an umbrella framework to coordinate interventions that target health education, mental health & psychosocial support (MHPSS), socio-emotional learning and student and teacher well-being. It also emphasizes the critical importance of happiness and well-being for better learning outcomes.
- Evidence-based, values-driven, and transformative: The Happy Schools criteria are derived from scientific evidence and philosophies of education from around the world that stipulate the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental human goal, as recognized in the global policy agenda in resolution 65/309 of the United Nations General Assembly entitled ‘Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development’.
What makes a school ‘happy’?
Happiness is understood differently across people and cultures. Therefore, UNESCO does not provide a universal definition of happiness, nor does it prescribe indicators or standards to measure happiness at the individual level. Rather, the initiative offers a high-level framework that breaks down happy learning environments into four key pillars: people, process, place and principles.
The people pillar focuses on
- supportive and collaborative relationships
- physical and social-emotional well-being
- the positive attitudes and attributes of the actors within school communities: students, parents, teachers, school leaders, support staff, central managers and community members.
The process pillar targets
- balanced curricula
- joyful and engaging pedagogies
- holistic and flexible assessments to ensure a manageable workload, culturally relevant and interdisciplinary content, active learning experiences, and flexible pathways to assess learning.
The place pillar seeks the transformation of both physical and digital school spaces through
- safe, healthy, accessible and sustainable infrastructure and facilities
- functional and inclusive spatial designs
- the use of school as a social hub for community learning and engagement to make both physical and virtual infrastructure fit for purpose
The principles pillar focuses on fundamental values that bind together school communities and enable the realization of the people, process and place pillars:
- trust
- inclusion
- empowerment
There is no there is no one-size-fits-all Happy Schools model. Instead, each context should develop their own initiatives to validate the criteria and adapt the high-level framework according to local realities. In this regard, UNESCO’s global initiative does not:
- Measure individual happiness of students and teachers. Rather, it provides a framework to create a conducive environment for joyful and engaging teaching, learning and development.
- Provide a rigid checklist for happy schools. Rather, the criteria are high-level and adapted according to each context.
- Add another parallel initiative to the many existing efforts to transform education. Rather, it offers an overarching and holistic framework to analyse school happiness from the system perspective and develop holistic plans that bring together complementary activities, tools and frameworks.
UNESCO will facilitate the policy dialogues at the global, regional and national levels to advocate for prioritizing happiness in and for learning.
There are four main routes to engage with the UNESCO Happy Schools initiative:
- Direct country engagement: UNESCO Member States may choose to approach UNESCO to receive technical support to adapt the global Happy Schools framework to their national education system and to develop national initiatives.
- Indirect support to self-led projects: The Happy Schools framework and other related tools are global public goods. Countries, organizations, schools, and educators, are welcome to use these materials to self-initiate, lead and implement their own Happy Schools projects at varying levels.
- Peer learning and advocacy: In collaboration with partners and UNESCO’s in-house experts and programmes across related areas, UNESCO’s Happy Schools team will issue policy briefs, finalize its public seminar series on each pillar of the framework, and organize targeted country peer learning sessions.
- Knowledge generation and dissemination: Contribute to the growing body of scientific literature that explores the links between happiness and learning, in particular through launching new research studies and projects that include evidence from international surveys.
News
Get in touch
Please contact us if you are:
- A UNESCO Member State seeking UNESCO’s support to develop a national Happy Schools initiative
- A country or partner interested in supporting UNESCO to translate the global report from English into another language
- A partner who would like to contribute to the global scale-up of the initiative
- A researcher studying the link between happiness and learning
While we are supportive of Happy Schools activities at all levels, please note that UNESCO does not offer tailored support or certification to individual schools seeking to become ‘happy schools’.
To help strengthen the global happy schools community around the world, join the Happy Schools LinkedIn community to see regular updates and connect with others interested in supporting the Happy Schools mission.