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.