{"id":18651,"date":"2026-01-16T14:05:33","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T14:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/?p=18651"},"modified":"2026-01-16T14:05:34","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T14:05:34","slug":"in-pursuit-of-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/in-pursuit-of-happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"In pursuit of Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

What does it mean to be happy, exactly? It\u2019s a question that has preoccupied the human mind for as long as thought has been recorded.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Solving the happiness puzzle has been the work of philosophers for centuries. From Aristotle\u2019s assertion it must come from a morally virtuous life to Nietzsche\u2019s proposal that meaningful goals and struggle should be prioritised.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unsurprisingly, it is also a question keeping parents and teachers awake at night. What does it take to make a happy young person? UNICEF\u2019s 2020 Worlds of Influence<\/a> report compares the \u201chealth, skills and happiness\u201d of children in the world\u2019s 41 richest countries, with some thought-provoking findings. Strong links were found between happiness and spending time with family, for example, and playing outside was also found to have a positive relationship to happiness.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The report finds a hugely mixed picture across the globe, with 90 per cent of young people in the Netherlands \u2018reasonably happy\u2019 at 15 years old, closely followed by young people in Mexico (86 per cent) and Switzerland (82 per cent). In contrast, the figures were 71 per cent for 15-year-olds in the USA and 64 per cent for those in the UK. And it is sobering to think that the report uses pre-pandemic data, so the picture now is probably starker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The inner workings of the teenage brain <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn 2019, we were very worried because mental health problems had already increased a lot in the previous 10 years in young people in the UK,\u201d says Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge<\/a>.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThen, national surveys showed that one in nine 14-year-olds reported having mental health problems. It\u2019s now one in six, because it’s seriously increased since the pandemic, probably for a variety of reasons, including uncertainty, fear of Covid and the social isolation of lockdowns and school closures.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blakemore specialises in the inner workings of the teenage brain – her 2012 TED Talk<\/a> on the topic has been viewed more than four million times – and what makes for a healthy, happy adolescence, or otherwise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBeing female is also a risk factor,\u201d she says. \u201cWe don’t really know why. It might be something to do with the oestrogen increases during puberty or the social pressures for girls. The higher levels of reported symptoms of poor mental health could partly be because girls are better at expressing their emotions and it’s less stigmatising to do so for girls than for boys.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers have also found that academic pressure can play a significant negative role. Blakemore says, \u201cIf you ask young people what they find most stressful in their lives, they don’t say social media, they say fear of failure and exam stress.\u201d They also worry about peer problems, she continues, so good-quality peer relationships (as well as good relationships with family) are protective against mental health problems.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Origins of Happiness? “The data is astonishing.”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

According to Paul Litchfield – a physician, former chair of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing<\/a> and adviser to several multinational companies on wellbeing – \u201cEmotional health is the most important driver of how young people are going to turn out.\u201d The academic side has a place and it is important, but longer term, actually, it’s been shown that emotional health has a bigger influence on life outcomes. What happens within the family is the strongest influence on emotional health and wellbeing, but schools are up there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat’s partly the interaction with other children but it’s also the interaction with teachers that can be enormously influential.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a point of view echoed by school leaders at Nord Anglia Education, the international education organisation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor me, you can\u2019t understand happiness unless you have strong relationships and we have a duty of care to find out what makes our students happy,\u201d says Sarah Osborne-James, Executive Director of Hamelin-Laie International School in Barcelona<\/a>, part of Nord Anglia. She adds, \u201cI always look for teachers who are passionate enough to want to get to know their students on a personal level and have the drive to know what’s going to make their students happy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We carry out student surveys to give feedback to teachers, and one of the questions is around how happy they are, along with questions around trust and being able to talk to their teacher. That sense of safety and happiness is so important for their wellbeing. Added to which, we also know that children learn best when they\u2019re happy.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Litchfield highlights the startling finding, in the book The Origins of Happiness, that the value added by the teacher a child had at age 8 and 11 was still influencing them at age 35 in terms of higher education entry and employment.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Economist Professor Lord Richard Layard is one of the book\u2019s authors – which looks at the various factors that matter most in happiness throughout life – and said that the link between early teaching and later life \u201chadn\u2019t been expected to come through so strongly.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt just jumped out, the data is astonishing,\u201d he says, citing the finding that the effects of primary schools and even individual teachers have consistently been found to persist throughout the following five years and longer. The research is not clear on exactly which characteristics of these teachers and their classrooms fed into the long-lasting effects, but happiness seems to be a key factor.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHappiness matters, full stop,\u201d Layard continues. \u201cWe showed that if you want to predict whether a person is going to have a happy adult life, whether they’re happy as a child is a better predictor than how well they do in their exams.”  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSchools are meant to be preparing people for satisfying lives so if they can, they should be trying to influence the happiness of the children as well as their academic attainment. And then we have this extraordinary finding that they influence the happiness of children as much as they influence their attainment. So that suggests that this should become a much more explicit goal of schools.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Happiness means flourishing”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

For Rosy Clark, Principal of Nord Anglia\u2019s school in Jakarta<\/a>, Professor Layard\u2019s research rings true. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we talk about happiness, I don’t think that means contentment,\u201d she says. \u201cThat’s not good enough. Happiness means flourishing. We want all our students to genuinely flourish in school, and the relationship with the teacher is all-important in that. It\u2019s got to be positive, respectful, caring.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, she says, recreating a true sense of community among the students themselves was a top priority after the extended lockdown in Indonesia, which saw some \u201cbarely leave the house\u201d for over a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clark and her Jakarta team have focused \u201ca huge amount of time on social and personal development,\u201d she explains. This included adding daily circle times to the schedule when students returned to school to \u201creadjust to being in a community outside of the home and redevelop those personal social skills\u201d by sharing feelings and listening to others.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe’ve since reduced the amount of time we spend on circles but we still keep them as a very valuable part of the daily structure,\u201d she explains. And as well as providing the space to \u201censure that relationships develop,\u201d the circles are now used by teachers to explicitly introduce happiness-enhancing emotional skills.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That sense of connectedness between students will become even more vital for wellbeing as they enter adolescence, explains Professor Blakemore.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe know that adolescents are hypersensitive to being excluded by their peer group,\u201d she explains. \u201cThey suffer more than adults in terms of their mood and anxiety if they experience social exclusion.\u201d Their drive to avoid social exclusion can result in a higher likelihood of risk-taking behaviour to fit in, she continues.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe all know that feeling of social exclusion \u2013 it’s horrible. And it’s particularly negative if you’re an adolescent, so adolescents are motivated to avoid the lower mood and increased anxiety by being included in their social group.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“Childhood memories shape how you see the world”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Adam Stevens, Principal of Nord Anglia\u2019s British International School of Charlotte<\/a>, explains that his team takes seriously the \u201cduty not just to fill children’s heads up with stuff,\u201d but to offer a \u201cspace to explore how we feel about things together\u201d and thereby equip their young people with skills for life.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe create a space to help them develop the skills that will allow them to manage life,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re not teaching them how to cook and iron; those are life skills, not skills for managing life. Skills for life are about how you cope with the world when moments are really difficult and challenging. If you have a way of seeing and understanding how those moments can be worked through, then you’re more likely to find happiness and steer away from depression and anxiety, and in extreme cases more likely to not contemplate suicide.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These skills are modelled across the school, including in the way negative behaviours are managed, he continues. Rather than students simply being reprimanded with a time out, detention or exclusion as a punishment, the opportunities presented by mistakes are embraced.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s more like: \u2018Here’s an opportunity for you to process how that feels, how that might feel for someone else, how you can empathise with them, how you can begin to find ways to fix this, how you can say sorry with genuine meaningfulness, how you can work to repair something that has gone wrong.\u2019 This is a skill for life that we all need.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He says childhood memories of school \u201cshape how you see the world,\u201d and so schools should acknowledge that they play a major part in \u201cthe formation of the core beliefs and dispositions\u201d that young people take into the world with them. \u201cIt is about being able to live a happy, fulfilled and purpose-driven life,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that comes from ways of thinking.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Origins of Happiness, Professor Layard and his co-authors come to a similar conclusion, with their research findings leading them to recommend the explicit teaching of values. \u201cThe central question in moral education is \u2018What kind of a person do you want to be?\u2019\u2026this topic is surely worthy of at least an hour a week in the school curriculum,\u201d the authors ponder.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But above all, Professor Layard says, we should be encouraging young people to find their way towards the kinds of futures that will make them happy.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don’t think we want to encourage all the children to go into finance,\u201d he says. \u201cWe want them to think about what difference they can make to the world, not just how they will earn an income in it. As soon as children begin to think about how they should be in the world, it should be about wanting to make a contribution.\u201d <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What does it mean to be happy, exactly? It\u2019s a question that has preoccupied the human mind for as long as thought has been recorded.   Solving the happiness puzzle has been the work of philosophers for centuries. From Aristotle\u2019s assertion it must come from a morally virtuous life to Nietzsche\u2019s proposal that meaningful goals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":18652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[618,246,250,247,248,249,6,59,60,11,51,52,53,54,55,8,49,50,56,57,58],"tags":[251,220,71],"week":[625,591],"class_list":["post-18651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nord-anglia","category-ey","category-prenursery","category-nursery-1","category-nursery-2","category-reception","category-dp","category-dp1","category-dp2","category-myp","category-myp1","category-myp2","category-myp3","category-myp4","category-myp5","category-pyp","category-pyp1","category-pyp2","category-pyp3","category-pyp4","category-pyp5","tag-ey","tag-myp","tag-pyp","week-625","week-2025-26"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Header-image-1300x655-PODN-copy-100.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18653,"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18651\/revisions\/18653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18651"},{"taxonomy":"week","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schoolnewsvicenza.h-farm.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/week?post=18651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}