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

Video Transcript

So the first half term is essentially all about the setup, and all about introducing happiness in your school. What I would really recommend is that you have champions of the happiness school project, and that could be anyone you like.

Doesn’t have to be heads, doesn’t have to be the leadership team in fact what would be really great is to have someone from every single year group who is a champion for that year group and the first half term we like to use tree’s a lot, so what we say is set up a tree in every single classroom.

I would also say put a tree up in your main hall. Because it’s really important that it’s part of the whole school project as well, so the first half term is about putting up the best tree, and you can even have a fun competition as well – You don’t have to but it’s just creative ways to really bring putting the tree up to life.

And around the tree, what you need to have is your themes and again we’ve supplied all these for you, so it’s up to you how far you want to take it. You can be as creative as you like and put your own themes up or you can use the ones that we create, and these just stick, on the tree as we have done here.

And talking to the children about why these themes are there, using some P for C questions about why they think confidence is part of happiness and in the pack that we give you all those questions are in there but you can create your own as well, and there’s also a lesson plan on how to run a P for C lesson as well.

And then once you have stuck the themes up you might want to do some photos with the children and we’ve seen that done brilliantly in schools where they show how confidence is enacted – Especially with the younger year groups. That’s always helpful where you can say to younger children, how do you think you might display confidence or you might say to foundation stage I’ve seen you’ve been really confident in the way that you’re working and used on XYZ and you talk to children about it but you put those examples up on the tree so they can really start to feel and understand why those themes are part of happiness.

One of the most important things in that first half term is to talk about happiness and again we’ve got some lovely P for C lesson plans around how to run a happiness lesson plan in that first half term and its up to you how much or how little you do, some schools in that first set up they just do one small forty minute lesson a week, some do less than that and some do more than that, so it’s up to you how you set that up.

What we would say is talking in school generally about happiness and those five themes and using your assemblies to do that and we’ve suggested that in the programme again with some resources is a really helpful way to start to get the children to learn about happiness.