Why the world needs happy schools: global report on happiness in and for learning

Programme Reports & Evaluations
Paris
UNESCO
2024
111 p.
Organizations

No matter the location or education level, schools can and should be fundamentally joyous places. At best, schools stimulate happiness through all five senses: seeing a teacher smile, hearing students laugh, feeling a hug from a friend, smelling fresh air, tasting a nutritious school meal. Schools bring together people of all ages, backgrounds and disciplines to a degree found in few other community spaces. This diverse community is bound together by a sense of shared purpose to teach and to learn. However, many school systems around the world have overlooked a core component of this purpose: to cultivate happy, lifelong learners. Without stimulating joyful school experiences, schools will not develop students who love to learn nor teachers who love to teach – and who feel happy to continue teaching and learning lifelong.

This report presents the UNESCO global Happy Schools framework consisting of 4 pillars – people, process, place and principles – and 12 high-level criteria to guide the transformation of learning. It offers a holistic model for embedding happiness into education policies and cultivating it in schools through systemic changes. The report illustrates how the ‘Happy Schools’ initiative aims to create top-down and bottom-up transformation, encouraging governments to recognize happiness as a core objective of education. It supports the scaling of promising practices of joyful learning from the school to the policy level.

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