Chapter 6 Teachers
If you think you’ve got a problem, you should see the head.
–– Notice in school staff room
Schools matter
Sceptics question whether teachers can make children happy. But the evidence shows that they can. The children born in 1991–2 in Bristol, England, have been followed up each year to see how they are faring. The researchers measured their happiness at age sixteen and, to explain it, they collected information about the children’s parents, as well as about the primary and secondary schools they attended.
What they discovered was remarkable. How happy children are at sixteen depends as much on which secondary school they are at as on everything we know about their parents.1 It is also profoundly affected by which primary school they attended all those years earlier. The findings are shown in Figure 6.1 below. This gives partial correlation coefficients which, as we explained earlier, reflect how far each factor contributes independently to the overall variation in happiness at age sixteen. The top row shows the effect of a weighted average of the measured characteristics of the parents. The next row shows the influence of the primary school the student went to, and the bottom row shows the influence of the secondary school they attended.2
(top) What predicts happiness at age sixteen?
(bottom) What in childhood predicts a happy adult?
So schools make a huge difference to children’s happiness at sixteen. They also have a significant impact on their behaviour. In fact they make about as much difference to their happiness and their behaviour as to their academic performance.
And so do individual teachers. In primary schools children are taught mainly by one teacher over the whole school year, so that in the Bristol survey we can trace how each teacher affected the happiness of the children in their care over the year. We found that the teacher made a greater difference to the children’s happiness than to their performance in maths.3 Remarkably, we can also see the long-lasting effect of individual primary school teachers on the children they taught, right up to the age of twenty.4
But how well, one might ask, does a child’s happiness predict her subsequent happiness as an adult? Or shouldn’t schools concentrate mainly on ‘what they do best’ – academic learning? The answer is a clear ‘No’. For the best predictor of a happy adult life is a happy childhood. This emerges clearly from Figure 6.1. Here we have stacked the cards strongly in favour of academic qualifications, by including all qualifications up to the PhD. But all these qualifications contribute less to a happy life than one measure of emotional health taken at the age of sixteen.
Thus schools are crucial to a happy society, as of course are parents (see Chapter 9). But schools may be easier to influence, which is why we discuss them first.
Are things moving in the right direction?
So how well are schools doing at this job? Since parents want their children to be happy, you might think that happiness would be an explicit goal of every school.5 In some it is, but in many it is not. And, if anything, the trend is in the wrong direction – with schools becoming ever more like exam factories. The situation differs between countries, but in England each year the exam results lead to published league tables of schools, ranked according to their academic performance. These scores become the outcome by which teachers are judged. The result is that the teachers get stressed, and from them (and from some parents) the pressure passes to the children. Children are often taught simply what they need to know for the test. This is hardly the way to train inquisitive minds that will go on learning joyfully throughout life. It is not even the best way to help children through exams.
For all the evidence shows that happy children learn better. This evidence is not simply correlational – it emerges from hundreds of interventions designed to make children happier, and which also make them do better at their academic work.6
In many countries test mania is affecting children of all ages. It underlies some aspects of the movement in support of ‘early intervention’. The main impulse here is a well-placed worry about the academic development of children from poor families.7 But the solution offered may not be the best one. Typically, the aim is to make children school-ready by the age of five so that they can learn to read as early as possible. But there is little evidence that being pushed to read earlier makes children better readers at the age of, say, eleven.8 Indeed, many of the countries with the best reading results at age eleven start reading at six or seven, when many children find learning easier.9 Starting earlier can just make them more anxious about reading.
At the same time, play has become devalued. Recently, England’s Chief Inspector of Schools wrote to pre-school teachers saying that play should be ‘teacher-led’. On the contrary, it is vital for children to organize their own play. This is confirmed in an interesting experiment on rats. Some of the young rats were reared with other equally rambunctious young rats; they experienced many a tumble. Other rats in the experiment were reared with rats made docile with drugs. When they became adults, the young rats who had experienced the rougher play were less anxious and more exploratory than those who had been protected from tumbles.10
Moving on to older children, there is a sorry tale from the influential PISA study of young people aged fifteen, conducted by the OECD.11 In the last survey, over a third of all the young people in OECD countries said, ‘I get very tense when I study’. As Table 6.1 shows, OECD students feel much less comfortable at school now than they did ten years earlier.
This is part of a wider trend among young people – towards worsening mental health. In Britain for example, the proportion of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who suffer from emotional problems doubled between 1974 and 2004, and it has risen again by 50 per cent since 2004.12 The problem is especially severe with teenage girls and is heavily focused on anxiety about relationships, appearance and exams. Some 6 per cent of all British children aged eleven to sixteen have tried to harm themselves,13 and by the age of twenty-four over 18 per cent have self-harmed and over 9 per cent have made a suicide attempt.14
Table 6.1
Fewer children feel comfortable in school (OECD)
Percentage of students who said ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 2015 | Change | |
| I feel like I belong at school | 82 | 73 | -9 |
| Other students seem to like me | 85 | 82 | -3 |
| I make friends easily at school | 89 | 78 | -11 |
| I don’t feel lonely at school | 92 | 85 | -7 |
| I don’t feel awkward and out of place in my school | 90 | 81 | -9 |
| I don’t feel like an outsider (or left out of things) at school | 93 | 83 | -10 |
Trends in the US are similar. Especially since the spread of social media (see Chapter 13), there has been a huge increase in distress among teenagers in the last few years.15 How can schools help with these problems?
The purpose of education
We need to start from a clear view of the overall purpose of education. If you accept our Policy Principle, the purpose is simple. It is set out in this box.
To develop capacities that will increase
- the happiness of the student (as pupil and adult), and
- the happiness of the rest of society.
Academic learning is a vital part of this – it illuminates the mind, and it prepares a person to contribute to the rest of society and to earn a living. But children must also learn how to live – how to treat others well and how to manage their own inner life. Education is about drawing out (Latin educere) the best in a child, especially the better side of their nature. Various phrases are used to describe these skills of behaving well and being happy. Some call it character, or values; others call it life skills. It clearly goes beyond Grit,16 and should be a major part of the work of any school. Let us call it wellbeing.
So the wellbeing of the children should be a central goal of school education. Countries vary in what they expect of their schools. In the Netherlands schools are required each year to measure how their students feel about their wellbeing and safety, and this is reported to the Dutch Schools Inspectorate together with a brief account of academic developments in the school.17 Equally, when private schools in England are inspected, wellbeing (called ‘personal development’) is now given equal weight with academic progress.18 But inspectors of the English state schools give it much less importance.
Everywhere, schools are subject to ever more pressure to achieve externally validated exam results. The only way to prevent these exam results from dominating the educational process is also to measure the other things that matter. To improve the wellbeing of our schoolchildren we have to measure it routinely for every child, as they do in the Netherlands.
If you treasure it, measure it
These measurements of wellbeing will serve three functions. They will motivate the school to give more weight to this side of education. They will help prospective parents to know whether their own children will be happy in a school. And they will tell a school which of their children is struggling – something the school does not always know.
It is unlikely that every government would wish to make such measurements compulsory.19 But once it became more common, it would spread rapidly in response to popular demand, as it has in South Australia.20 Many suitable questionnaires are available which cover the main things the school needs to know: the children’s happiness, their mental health and behaviour, and their experience of the school, including bullying.21 The questions would be answered both by teachers and (from the age of nine onwards) by the children.22 Clearly schools differ widely in the kinds of children they take in. So a school should not judge itself by how happy its pupils are, but by whether they become happier as they go through the school (relative to the national average). That should be the key statistic.23
So how can schools promote happiness and altruism in their students? It is helpful to look at this under two headings. The first is moral education (the acquisition of values) and the second is specific life skills.
Values
Children absorb moral values from their environment (the ethos of the school) and from specific teaching. Different schools have different approaches. One well-tried method is a code which embodies a set of values. This code is reviewed at intervals through a public debate involving teachers, parents and children; and every teacher, parent and child who enters the school has to sign up to it.24 The code will influence not just how people behave to each other, but also the content of school assemblies, the truths drawn from many of the subjects taught (like literature), and the content of specific moral education.
The central question in moral education is ‘What kind of a person do you want to be?’ This can be illuminated from hundreds of role models of noble living, and from the common elements of all the great religions.25 This topic is surely worthy of at least an hour a week in the school curriculum.
The legal framework for moral education differs between countries.26 But no society has flourished unless grown-ups have clear ideas about how one should behave, and transmit them to the younger generation. I believe the central concept should be our Ethical Principle – that we should live so as to increase the happiness in the world (including our own). What an inspiring purpose in life for young people – and so much better than just trying to be smarter and richer than their peers.
Life skills
Apart from values, there are many other specific things which young people need to learn if they are to live well. These include:
- understanding and managing your own emotions (‘emotional learning’)
- understanding and caring for other people (‘social learning’)
- healthy living (food, drink, drugs, tobacco, exercise and sleep)
- sexual relationships
- parenting behaviour
- understanding the media
- mental illness and how it can be treated.
Clearly these overlap with values, but they are more heavily empirical – understanding how we are (and not just how we would like to be). In addition there are specific skills, of which the most important is mindfulness. This helps people to calm themselves down and can reduce depression and improve behaviour.27 It can also improve attention, and thus lead to better exam results.
This set of ‘life-skills’ can now be taught in an evidence-based way. There are hundreds of brief interventions (twenty hours or less) which have been shown to improve one of the elements in our list of topics.28 But mostly these results are short-term – one year or less. We can only produce a happiness revolution if these topics are taught continuously throughout the child’s school life – with each topic reinforcing what has gone before.
To produce such a continuous curriculum in secondary schools, our research group surveyed all the available short interventions on the topics listed above. We produced a combination which could be taught on a weekly basis from ages eleven to fifteen.29 This ‘Healthy Minds’ curriculum has now been tested in twenty-six schools in a randomized trial. The results are highly encouraging. The students had completed detailed wellbeing questionnaires before the course and they did so again four years later. On the primary outcome (‘global health’) they improved by 10 percentage points, with a similar result for physical health. And on life-satisfaction and behaviour they improved by 7 percentage points.30 What makes the programme work?
- It does not depend on an inspirational teacher. It consists of detailed materials, and it is the materials which are inspiring.
- The materials focus on good things to do – rather than bad things to avoid. Many ‘healthy life’ interventions have no effect because they focus on what not to do. If, instead, you have enough good things to do, you will not fill the void with risky behaviour.
- The teachers must be trained to use the materials well.31 In Healthy Minds it takes five days to train a teacher to use one year’s teaching materials. Many of these teachers will teach other subjects. But we also need, in our secondary schools, teachers who have been trained to specialize in teaching wellbeing. These people (often with psychology backgrounds) will become invaluable missionaries for a happy atmosphere in our schools.
The situation in primary schools is different because every teacher will have to teach life skills and be trained to do so. Again, there are successful programmes that have been well researched. For example the PATHS programme (Promoting Attentive Thinking Strategies), which takes up around 130 hours, has been shown to improve behaviour, reduce violence and improve academic attainment.32
Positive Education
In recent years Martin Seligman and his colleagues have developed Positive Education as a concept that embraces all that we have been talking about.33 This movement is flourishing from Australia to Chile, and has spawned its own International Positive Education Network (IPEN). Within this movement, there have been major controlled trials in Bhutan, Mexico and Peru of a fifteen-month wellbeing curriculum in secondary schools, lasting two hours per week. These trials monitored the effects of the curriculum on both wellbeing and academic performance. And does this curriculum help academic performance? It does. In fact, in all three countries, the course affected wellbeing and academic performance to a similar degree in terms of percentage points.
Wellbeing teaching improves wellbeing and academic performance (Bhutan)
The results in Bhutan are shown in Figure 6.2. They show that, by the end of the course, the young people who took the wellbeing course had improved both their wellbeing and their academic performance compared with the control group – in each case by around 20 percentage points. Moreover, the gain was still in place a year later. In Peru, the trial involved altogether 700,000 students, using the cascade method: the team trained trainers, who each trained more trainers, who each trained the school teachers. Not surprisingly, the effects on wellbeing and academic performance were smaller (around 8 percentage points), but well worth having. A week-by-week curriculum of positive wellbeing education is now available right through from ages five to eighteen.
Teaching methods and school discipline
Finally, there are the issues of teaching methods and school discipline. There is good evidence that teaching methods send a message to children. If more group-work is involved and less lecturing, children become more trusting and more cooperative in their attitudes.34 This helps to explain the more pro-social attitudes of Scandinavian adults. Another key issue is the system of motivation. As Carol Dweck has consistently shown, this depends on what teachers praise. If they praise effort, it motivates every student.35 If they praise performance, it motivates only a few, and for many it results in low mood and feelings of helplessness.
But nothing is likely to work in a school where there is bad discipline. Teachers need to know how to maintain calm and how to look after themselves. One successful approach to classroom control is the famous ‘Incredible Years’ programme, originally designed for training parents but adapted to training teachers.36
As regards the self-preservation of the teachers, one radical approach is for every teacher in a school to become a mindfulness practitioner by taking the eight-week Mindfulness- Based Stress Reduction course (MBSR). This can provide a common culture for a school. It can reduce teacher burnout and bring huge benefits to the children, whether or not the children themselves practise mindfulness.37
Much less effective would be a reduction in class size. There is no strong evidence that (with class sizes at their current levels in the West) a reduction in class size improves the happiness of children or their academic attainment.38 Much better to spend the money on sabbaticals for teachers, better salaries and better training.
Wellbeing in universities
At Yale University the most popular course ever taught is a recent one, ‘Psychology and the Good Life’. It gets over a thousand students. This is perhaps not surprising since the President of the university is the psychologist who invented the concept of emotional intelligence. But there are other universities across the world where similar courses are being taught, and in a few it is compulsory (for example, TecMilenio University in Mexico, and the University of Buckingham in Britain).39
TecMilenio is a university with 60,000 students across twenty-nine provinces in Mexico. In 2013 its President, Hector Escamilla, decided to make positive psychology a central ingredient of every student’s experience. The aim of the university, he said, should be to help every student discover their purpose in life and then acquire the skills to achieve it. To this end, each student and each staff member has to take a course in positive psychology. For students it is a part of their basic curriculum; for staff it is a digital course taking eighty hours of total study. The university also evaluates policy changes against the criteria of student and staff wellbeing.
Similarly, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham believes that every university should teach positive psychology to all; they should also offer optional mindfulness classes, give each student a tutor, and a mentor from a previous cohort of students, and regularly measure the wellbeing of every student.40 But does this approach make sense – and is it enough?
It does make sense, but it is not enough. Centuries ago most university students studied ethics. But not now. Students are preparing for the job market, but what values will they take with them? Surely moral and political philosophy should be standard subjects for every university student. Otherwise what happens? Each adult absorbs the norms of their own profession: economists and businessmen absorb the values of competition; engineers absorb the value of technical excellence; and so on. But where is the ability to assess a situation for its overall effects, and to manage your own conduct accordingly?
I believe that a course which included the philosophy of the Happiness Principle (plus critiques of it) should be a standard element in university education, together with the basics of positive psychology. If this happened, students could indeed become the standard bearers of the happiness revolution, as they have been of so many revolutions in the past.
Mental health
Going further, educational institutions also have a duty of care for individuals. At some point, at least a quarter of young people will have some mental health problem.41 Schools and universities need to create an atmosphere where mental health problems can be freely discussed. And they need to know how to refer students for professional help (preferably within their own institution).42 We shall come to professional help in Chapter 8. But every teacher should have some training in mental health – in how to recognize problems, give students what advice they can, and get them evidence-based professional help when this is needed.
Conclusions
There is no conflict between academic excellence and the acquisition of values, life-skills and happiness. In fact the evidence shows that happier people learn better.43 And they contribute more to the happiness of the world.
So schools and universities can become society’s secret weapon for improving our culture. They already have huge influence on the wellbeing of our children – for good or for ill. But if the effects are to be good, five things are needed:
- Schools must be judged, in large part, by how they promote the happiness and behaviour of their students
- Schools should measure how the happiness of their pupils is progressing.
- The ethos should promote happiness and virtue; students should be non-violent and mindful
- All educational institutions should teach life-skills and values in a fully professional way, and
- They should recognize when students have mental health problems and get them help.
Teachers can do a lot. But when their students eventually go out to work, will their managers offer them an environment which fulfils or disheartens them?
