Stephanie Davies, Laughology CEO, explains how the Happy-Centred School PSHE Programme works

Video Transcript

Hi, my name’s Stephanie Davies, and I’m the founder and director of Laughology.

I’m also the creator of Happy Centred Schools, and I just wanted to talk to you a little bit today about the Happy Centred School Programme. – What it is, why it’s there and why it’s good for your school?

So, Happy Centred Schools was created to really understand – Can we help young people and adults, Children be happy? And not in this idea of fluffy happiness where you have to be happy all the time, because I truly don’t believe that, but in the sense of – Can we help them develop skill sets that are life skills that will help them flourish in life and develop further skills to be able to help themselves move forward and live lives essentially where they are happy and the simple answer is – yes, we can. And it’s based on research I’ve done years ago when I was at University but also based on research that’s been done by Dr Martin Seligman, Shawn Achor - some of the great writers and researchers around happiness.

And when I looked into it I really wanted to look at what are the skills that we need to give young people to help them to, to develop and these were whittled down to five skills and there’s lots more within that when you start to unpick the programme but the five skills that are really important we see are – Coping skills, ‘cause life isn’t about being happy all the time. Positive relationships, so children can get on with each other but also manage conflicts in their life as well, also support, not just getting but giving support.

We know that one of the most important things to help you be happy is being kind to others but helping other people because that also helps yourself understand who you are and gives you purpose as well.

Also personal development is really, really important because it’s part of how we develop in our lives, with children we call that achievement and success, and the final one is confidence and you’ll see that there are five themes to happiness but within that we do very much talk about all the other things that are important for PSHE like developing relationships, like talking about British values and all that is part of the Happy Centred School Programme.

So each half term the idea is that you concentrate on one of these themes but you don’t have to do it yourself because we’ve done it all for you, we’ve created a resource that spans from foundation stage right the way through to year six, with every single year group having their own resources set with lots of templates in them so you don’t have to do anything and within those resources there are lesson plans that you can do and there are six lesson plans for every single year group, for every single theme and how much of what you do is up to you, but I’ll tell you a little bit more about how it would work in your school.