Work in progress

Today’s news that the Vauxhall car factory in Ellesmere is to be saved from closure will be a huge relief to the 2,000 or so workers whose jobs were at risk. This coincides with some welcome improvements in yesterday’s employment growth figures. According to the ONS, unemployment is down by 45,000 and so too are the numbers claiming job seekers allowance. Experience tells us that it is unwise to think that the darkest days of the economic slump are behind us, but surely isn’t this cause for some optimism?

For the economy maybe, but not necessarily for workers. A closer look at the figures reveals three or four key shifts we should probably be concerned with. The first is that the number of people out of work for more than a year rose by something like 3 per cent to nearly 900,000. A recent New York Times article lists a number of research reports which highlight the kind of ‘scarring’ effects that such long-term unemployment can cause. The title of one Pew Research Center article says it all: “Lost income, Lost friends – and Loss of Self Respect.” In a sort of self-perpetuating downward spiral, these problems in turn decrease the likelihood of finding a job.

The second trend to be wary of is the rising number of part-time workers. While some people choose to work fewer hours for reasons such as childcare issues or the desire for more leisure time, there are many others who would much prefer to work full-time. The ONS figures from yesterday show that the number of people working part-time because they could not find a full-time job reached a record-breaking 1.5 million, up by 73,000 in a quarter. The key problem with this shift to part-time employment is that it can have repercussions for people’s benefit entitlements. The recent changes to Working Tax Credits mean that people now have to work 24 hours in a week rather than 16 to qualify for benefits. The result is that if you are a part-time worker who cannot secure the minimum 24 hours you could lose up to £3,900 a year.

This brings me to the third, already well-established, shift of declining levels of growth in wages. ONS figures reveal that total pay (including bonuses) climbed by only 0.6 per cent over the past year.  Given that annual inflation is currently at around 3.5 per cent, a crude calculation would make this a real wage decrease of a notable 2.9 per cent.

The fourth shift, albeit I believe not one documented in the ONS data sets, is the growth of ‘zero-hour contracts’. Typically seen in low-paid and low-skilled work, these are full-time contracts but ones which do not commit the employer to provide any working hours to the employee. The idea is that employers can fluctuate the hours of workers subject to their need. Although not ideal for the employee, in theory it should help to create more flexibility for employers and in turn increase the likelihood of them taking on more staff (since they’re not afraid of being stuck with workers should there be a serious downturn). The problem is that these contracts are reportedly being abused by many companies, leaving workers with no security and the added trouble of continually trying to re-establish their benefits when their working hours fall away. The fact that these individuals still theoretically have a contract makes claiming all the more difficult.

The following interview extract from Stephen Armstrong’s The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited gives us a sense of how those at the bottom of the pyramid are struggling to cope with the upheaval this causes:

Robin Tenant works at Argos, in Warrington. “They gave me a four-hour contract – it only guarantees four hours of work a week,” he explains. “Now for some people it suits them absolutely fine, do you know? Four hours work a week if you were a pensioner trying to top up your pension or you’re just starting going back to work is fine. But we are a family and both me and my partner have a four-hour contract with one store and so we have eight hours work between us for a week. We’re employed, so we don’t have… so unemployment benefit becomes a complete nightmare because we technically have contracts and we have thirty-six hours work one week and then four and it means that as soon as something happens – like the week before Christmas last year the snow happened – we’re stuffed.

All of the above four shifts illustrate how far we have yet to go in creating not just more, but better jobs. Not every job or working contract is a good one, so why is it that we breathe a collective sigh of relief when employment figures go up? Moreover, why do we rail at the unemployed for their lack of effort in finding employment and yet do very little for those who eventually do find scraps of work?

What is perhaps needed is a more critical analysis and honest debate about what a good job or contract really looks like. This means looking seriously at models like ‘Flexicurity’ championed by Will Hutton, and learning from the likes of Germany where trade unions, employers and workers club together to reach an agreement on working patterns which suits all parties. Conversely, what we don’t want is a fixation on job numbers alone or indeed a political class that seeks to stifle the debate by using terms such as “job snobs” to dismiss those who raise the subject.

The Pupil Premium: time for a Plan C?

Schools have multiple purposes, some universally agreed upon, many contested. Judging from Nick Clegg’s re-announcement about the Pupil Premium on Monday, schools have one new purpose: to demonstrate the impact of the Liberal Democrats on Coalition policy.

As Conor Ryan’s blog explains in detail, the Pupil Premium is essentially a small addition to a school funding system which already has significant weighting for disadvantage and other factors. Its existence may actually stall progress towards more radical changes to school funding – ones which would differentiate more for social class, but less for age. Given what we know about the importance of the early years, it is difficult to justify why secondary pupils have so much more money spent on them than primary children. Such  changes would create genuine losers, mainly sharp-elbowed secondary schools in more affluent constituencies.

But let’s welcome the Pupil Premium’s existence, and its totemic as well as cash value, and ask ourselves two further questions. What should schools do with this additional funding? And how should they account for this spend?

Schools which are successfully closing the achievement gap – and the Education Endowment Foundation has found a significant number of them – are likely to be taking a whole-school and whole-budget approach. Yes, within their strategies will be a number of smaller initiatives, but at their foundations lie high quality teaching for all, and forensically targeted teaching interventions for a few, all underpinned by excellent pastoral and extra-curricular support. Any school that sees the pupil premium as the answer to their achievement gap woes (and there won’t be many of them) probably won’t succeed.

There is thus no clear rationale for the DfE requirement for schools to account separately for their Pupil Premium spend. And unless schools use this funding to develop a highly controlled, bounded intervention, it is unlikely that we will ever know the specific impact of this injection of funding. Correlation will be difficult, causation almost impossible.

There are three orthodoxies around the use of this funding which need challenging:

First, unlike yesterday’s announcement about personalised SEN budgets, there is an overwhelming consensus that it should be schools themselves, rather than individual pupils or parents, who should determine how the Pupil Premium should be spent. This might well be justified, but could a few schools create a model where where pupils, parents and school co-commissioned additional support, learning from the disaster of Individual Learning Accounts and the quiet success of Pupil Learning Credits.

Second, schools are not being encouraged to think more expansively about how the Premium could lever additional match funding from other sources. If funding was pooled with other schools or other funding streams that are dealing with a similar client group it could be spent collaboratively to achieve far more, and develop more robust evaluation methodologies, adopting EEF methodology. Again, some schools may be taking this approach, but competitive and accounting pressures mean that collaborative use of this funding is unlikely to be the norm.

Third, Clegg has placed the Pupil Premium at the centre of his strategy to increase social mobility. Anna Vignoles’ blog demonstrates the tenuous link between such spending initiatives and social mobility, and the RSA’s Louise Thomas has usefully questioned many assumptions in this debate. The truth is that, despite the distracting headline figures around Oxbridge entrance, it is too early to know the full impact of the previous government’s policies on social mobility. If social mobility has stalled in the last twenty years, it will be largely as a result of what happened in the twenty years before that. The pupil premium may help deliver outcomes which provide stronger foundations for social mobility to increase, but it would be a mistake to promise any more from this short term initiative.

Later this week the RSA publishes its Plan C for economic recovery: ‘coping with long term slow growth’. My own plan C for the pupil premium (which would need no re-announcement) consists of three Cs: co-commissioning, collaboration, and coping with premature evaluations from a government in a hurry to prove its impact.

Will reducing the “educational attainment gap” make us more equal?

Jenni Russell wrote a refreshing column in the Evening Standard yesterday, questioning the direct link between achievement at school and social mobility. She uses the example of an acquaintance who came from a disadvantaged and chaotic home, but was succeeding at school, taking A Levels, having entered a grammar school. Nevertheless, at age 17 she came to realise that “even if she did brilliantly at university, she was never going to earn enough to own a flat in outer London or leap free of student debt…The risks she was being asked to take on terrified her.”

Both Michael Wilshaw and Michael Gove made speeches at the independent school Brighton College last week, outlining the unacceptability of the dominance of independently educated students in all elite professions and walks of life, including the arts and sport. The conclusions drawn were that our schools and teachers must have higher expectations of disadvantaged students, and work towards helping them to achieve better GCSEs and A Levels.

One can’t argue with the fact that we can predict how well a child will do at school more or less accurately by asking how much their parents earn (and this applies across the salary range of parents – not just to those at the very top or bottom) is wrong.

However, it does not necessarily follow that the life chances and future incomes of young people would be equalised were this difference in achievement at school to be eradicated, as is so often assumed. This is why Jenni Russell’s argument was so refreshing, for it interrogated the relationship between the unacceptable inequality in school achievement and the unacceptable inequality in society. For to argue that a better distribution of formal qualifications does not an equal society make, does not mean that it is any less unacceptable that the distribution of educational attainment is so skewed. Educational equality and social equality are just not the same thing.

I’ve argued for a thought experiment in which achievement at school is evenly distributed between social classes in a previous blog. I won’t rehearse it in detail here, but it asks the reader to pretend that the income of parents had no bearing on the qualifications achieved at school. What would this do to the relationship between formal qualifications and the labour market? Would you find the children of higher professionals who got only average GCSEs working in a local shop, driving a bus, delivering the mail or cleaning a hospital ward? Would you find those whose parents struggled to make ends meet while they were growing up represented among the higher professions in any kind of proportionate numbers? The evidence from Tower Hamlets suggests not: Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, highlights how young people from the borough with the highest rate of child poverty in the country are failing to translate their university degrees into meaningful employment: “it quickly became clear that many were making basic mistakes in their job applications and, crucially, they lacked social networks and confidence…What is particularly shocking is that despite the rapid expansion in higher education, so little progress has been made. While some working-class children have broken through, those in the middle and upper-middle classes have maintained their dominance of the professions.”

As Jenni points out, the myth of social mobility is necessary because “without it our society stops looking legitimate”. But while society is unequal enough that for their children to live in the bottom 10% is sufficiently unthinkable for the top 10% of parents then we will never have anything approaching a properly mobile society. Both because of the belief among those struggling at the bottom that the qualifications they have been promised are a passport to a comfortable life is in fact a myth and that things will always be more difficult for them than for others (as in the case of Jenni’s acquaintance); and because of the sharp elbows of those at the top who by hook or by crook will ensure that their offspring have the advantage in the race (as in the case of most people I know and can hardly blame).

So are schools really being challenged to shift the relationship between how much a child’s parents earn and the eventual place that child takes in society? Or are they being asked to reduce the long tail of underachievement in our system to make our society as a whole better qualified and more competitive? If the latter, then this is not social mobility, at least not in the sense of ones background being irrelevant to ones prospects. If the former, then it will take far more than good GCSEs to crack that nut. Which in turn means we need to think again about what it is we’d like schools to be doing for young people, how their performance should be measured, and what the actual barriers to achieving equality through the education system (rather than merely within it) are.

Vancouver Fellows use LEGO® Serious Play™ for Creative, Collaborative Decision Making

Guest blogger Jacqueline Lloyd Smith, FRSA, discusses a recent Fellows’ meeting in Vancouver where she introduced the principles of the LEGO® Serious Play™ methodology

Globally, many companies are working with Management Consultants who use a facilitative approach with a creative tool called LEGO Serious Play.  Yes, this is the LEGO brick, the toy that was originally designed for children and named after the Danish  phrase leg godt, which means “play well”.

You might be wondering, how can adults play with LEGO to generate better ideas, improve decision making, or communication?  Following is an overview of the process, how it works, and a description of how, this spring, Canadian Fellows and Friends of the Society met in Vancouver to discuss the strategic direction for the group going forward, utilizing this innovative tool to facilitate deeper, richer conversations.

First, what is this tool? In the early 2000s, the LEGO Group, struggling with its own strategy, decided to invest in learning. Because the toy had helped shape so many young minds, could it also be used to help adults address complex business processes such as strategic thinking, innovation mining, problem solving, and decision making?  Great question. We know that business, organizations and communities struggle to do these things well, especially now, during rapid times of change requiring a more agile mindset.

They worked with two psychologists who created the framework for the process, which has four steps:

Time for your social check-up!

I recently joined the RSA Connected Communities team working on the Social Mirror app. Social Mirror is a smartphone/tablet app that allows users to measure, visualise, and change their social connections, with the potential to strengthen communities while improving a person’s own health and well-being.
As a graduate student studying Digital Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, I’m excited to put what I’ve been studying at the intersection of sociology and digital innovation into practice.

Social Mirror is a project that RSA Connected Communities is working on in collaboration with Nathan Matias at MIT Center for Civic Media.  I’m really excited to be working with this team, and think that Social Mirror is a great tool to elaborate on the work that Connected Communities is doing.  Connected Communities understands the importance of a person’s social network and the impact this has on their personal life.  Understanding this connection is one step.  Social Mirror is the next.

With Social Mirror, people will be able to map out their own real-life social networks (so don’t think Facebook) and understand how their social connections affect their lives.  Simply by visualising one’s social network, people begin to make choices to improve their social networks.  Sometimes it’s hard to see the connection between the friends you have and your ability (or not) to find a job. Social Mirror will allow people to map their real-life social networks to help them recognise the connection between their communities and their individual health and well-being. When people visualise and interact with their social networks, they are more likely to understand how this affects their personal lives and start to make choices that will improve their social network.  As Nathan puts it, it is essentially a tool for conducting a social checkup.

Helping the elderly and isolated
An area that we want to focus on while developing Social Mirror is how the app can be used to help the elderly and isolated within a community.  Over the summer we will be working in the New Cross Gate area and beyond to develop this app in a way that will specifically benefit the elderly.  One way to do this might be to work with health practitioners to develop a diagnostic tool.  Health practitioners would be able to use Social Mirror to understand the patient’s social network and the implications for the patient’s health. The app will also be able to prompt suggestions for improving the patient’s social network to improve overall health and wellbeing.

One interesting example of apps that help the elderly is Care Innovations Connect.  This is an app developed by Intell and GE.  It is intended to help seniors living on their own to facilitate communication between them and their caregiver. It also has a social networking aspect, provides games to maintain mental fitness, news and information about the local community, and sends alerts when medication needs to be taken.  Do you know of any other apps that have been developed to help the elderly?

 

Smart enough to be dumb, or vice versa?

Just came across this section of Transforming Behaviour Change while looking for a reference about decision-making and thought it was worth sharing. Any vegetarians or anti-vegetarians out there with views on the subject?

“This message that we are not rational is not a simple one to convey, because we also appear to have a somewhat craven need for rationalisation. In fact, the social presumption of rationality is so strong that we are inclined to find and create reasons for our actions, or even invent them, merely to preserve the illusion that our choices are freely chosen.

This social imperative of cognitive consistency is the reason why vegetarians, for example, are frequently cross-examined, often by an entire dinner table, on the rationale and consistency of their preference to avoid the meat that most people eat. At an anecdotal level, it seems the ethical and environmental gains achieved through eating less meat are given relatively little attention, compared to the social sanction of highlighting perceived inconsistencies in the individuals making the effort.

For example, the inconsistency of wearing a leather belt while avoiding a beef stew appears to be more salient in social company than the fact that, for example, if every
American reduced meat intake by one meal a week, it would have the equivalent environmental impact as taking five million cars off the road.

In a recent talk on ‘Eating Animals’ at the RSA, Jonathan Saffron Foer argued that most meat eaters simply do not want to know about the conditions on factory farms, for fear that it would create unbearable cognitive dissonance. In light of animal suffering, and concomitant environmental degradation, Foer suggests people cannot reconcile their desire to enjoy the taste and cultural appropriateness of meat eating with their desire not to cause unnecessary suffering, so rather than stop eating meat, they prefer not to know about the suffering and the environmental harm:

“We have such a resistance to being hypocrites that we would rather be fully ignorant and fully forgetful all the time.”

This claim is a strong one, but it is important to make this case because it is fundamental to the social influence on decisions, and supports the need to shape social norms, rather than merely being subject to them, for it is these norms that norm-alise our behaviour.

A similar point about the challenge of pervasive self-justification is made by Tavris and Aronson, who contend that there are very few conscious hypocrites in the world. Indeed our capacity to rationalise our behaviour as being consistent with our beliefs is extraordinary, and we usually achieve this by shifting our beliefs rather than our behaviour, even if doing so paradoxically flies in the face of reason. As Tavris and Aronson put it:

“All of us, to preserve our belief that we are smart, will occasionally do dumb things. We can’t help it. We are wired that way.”

Are there better ways to surface undeclared work?

Earlier this month, it was reported that HMRC were setting in place a voluntary disclosure scheme to encourage regular eBay traders to declare their tax liabilities. In a sign that the tax authorities are treating undeclared income from online trading more seriously, sellers who fail to come forward by the 6 week disclosure deadline will be subject to a penalty of between 40 and 100 per cent of their tax obligations. The figure is between 10 and 20 per cent for those who choose to cooperate with the authorities and declare their earnings.

For a country that is at the forefront of online trading, this appears to be a sensible and timely move. According to analysis by The Economist, by 2016 the ‘internet economy’ will contribute up to 12 per cent of the UK’s GDP, the highest figure among leading industrialised nations by a large margin. Alongside other structural trends such as the continuous rise in the number of self-employed workers (now over 1 in 10 of the workforce), this is creating a number of challenges for tax authorities since it opens up more opportunities for non-compliance.

In a country where some estimate that the ‘hidden economy’ already represents as much as 10% of GDP, it is clear that we will need to find better ways of channelling these informal activities into the formal, tax-paying sphere. One approach witnessed in initiatives like that mentioned above is to deploy greater deterrence measures; ratcheting up penalties for non-compliance and expanding the number of inspections. The reasoning behind this is simple: people will weigh up the cost and benefits of their actions and, assuming a sizable penalty and a strong likelihood of being caught, cease their activities.

This sounds like a reasonable strategy until we consider that the decisions people make are seldom based solely on such a cool and calculated cost-benefit analysis. For some, working informally is the only option available. For instance, those living in poverty and acting as family carers may have to engage in undeclared work to top up low level benefits that would diminish or cease entirely should they work in the formal sphere (this is a central message in the ‘Need not Greed’ campaign established by Community Links). For others like micro-entrepreneurs, the costs of registration, the complexities of book-keeping and the burden of tax on operations prohibit them from running their business in the formal sphere. Applying sanctions for non-compliance in this context could just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

This is not to say that deterrence doesn’t work. In many cases it can be the most effective means of drawing out people from informal working patterns, particularly those who have resisted all previous calls and who could still live comfortably while declaring their income. But therein lies the problem of deterrence approaches. They are like using a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed. Because deterrence is often not tailored to different groups and different needs, everybody is on the receiving end. Whether that’s the persistent non-compliers, the micro-entrepreneurs who are struggling to get by or the vast majority of the population who are fully compliant.

As a number of experts in the field have pointed out, the effect of this blanket approach can often be to alienate taxpayers and non-taxpayers alike, creating an “us and them” culture between citizens and the state. Those who are just about making ends meet are unlikely to respond well to a distant authority which is demanding they pay thousands in taxes for government services which they perhaps rarely feel the benefit of. Studies have shown that deterrence approaches can even embolden taxpayers to engage in more undeclared work in future years.

Arguably what is needed instead is a two-fold approach to addressing the hidden economy. First, we need to cultivate greater tax morality, recognised by many as one of the biggest predictors of informal activity. By this I mean that the state should make people feel that they are getting enough out of the system relative to what they are putting in, and that it should be fair in the way it treats every individual, rich or poor. In practice, efforts to boost tax morality might include introducing more of a contributory principle in welfare services, or establishing the ‘life-cycle’ welfare accounts that the 2020PSH once suggested. It would certainly involve addressing tax dodging from high earners.

Second, we need a more tailored approach to addressing informal activity which combines deterrence with encouragement. Community Links, the organisation that has done most in the UK to look into this issue, recognise that many informal entrepreneurs aspire to formalise their operations and that it just a matter of time before they can grow their business to a size that makes this feasible. Government services could do better to help informal entrepreneurs reach this stage by providing more appropriate advice (the current offer from JCP and Business Link is often not relevant) and decent sources of financial credit. In practice, tailored support could be delivered by segmenting groups and individuals by their risk or otherwise of non-compliance, as has been done by the Australian government.

For anyone keen to know more about effective approaches to addressing undeclared work and supporting hidden entrepreneurs, look out for an upcoming report from the Enterprise team.

Resilience: often necessary, occasionally evil

Yesterday, straight from an energising discussion with our Projects team about future RSA approaches to public services issues, I rushed to deal with something more current and tangible. My twelve year daughter has a long term health condition, which means regular appointments and occasional bouts of hospitalisation. After twelve years navigating a Victorian monolith, we now have the airy complexity of  a brand new PFI building. We’ve gone straight from Dickens to Huxley.

My daughter has always been intense and feisty – most people who spend a few hours with her need to come up for air at some point – but in her regular interactions with medical people and places, this is amplified. And adolescence is now adding to the mix. Yesterday, she refused to answer questions that weren’t using the correct medical terms on the piece of paper in front of the physiotherapist. She asked irritating questions, gave cryptic answers, and her body language was moody, sullen and horizontally sprawled – she looked like she was on our sofa watching something excruciatingly boring on TV.

Like any parent would, I often plead for her to be more polite to a group of people that definitely want her to be as well as possible. At the same time, I know that her assertive games are a form of resilience – a way of coping with loss, setbacks and change, and steeling herself for future battles and disappointments. She is an expert patient now, and her attitude in some ways ensures that the system treats her as such.

I remember Maria Balshaw, now Director of Manchester City Galleries, arguing that ‘arsiness’ was a key attribute of creativity, so should possibly be taught in schools. I doubt if this idea will catch on, but we do need to accept the need to develop qualities in our young people that aren’t always pleasant. Whether it’s the liberal perspective on social and emotional learning, or the more traditional approach through character education, both emphasise qualities and attitudes that, in essence, make children easier for us adults to deal with. Just be nice. Even our Opening Minds framework, which includes ‘coping with change’ as a key aspect of the ‘managing situations’ competency, might not be quite ready to develop and assess approaches which elicit and celebrate the nasty.

This links to an emerging idea for a broader RSA project:  can we harness new insights into the teenage brain and other research to ask how can schools and society relish rather than fear the teenage years? What kinds of behaviour change do we need to promote, in both teenagers and the adults and institutions which deal with them, to ensure a happy, productive adolescence?

 

Model Mentoring: an RSA SkillsBank update

RSA SkillsBank continues to grow with a variety of pilot programmes working with a diverse group of partner organisations. Our latest confirmed initiative is the Adopt a Student pilot with Lilian Baylis Technology School, the first London school to join the RSA’s Family of Academies. The aims of the pilot are varied but there will be a focus on commitment between student and mentor demonstrating a higher level of work experience and career development. Already we have received enthusiastic feedback from Fellows wishing to participate in this experiment.

The launch event planned for the pilot, Thursday 31 May, will allow Fellows and RSA SkillsBank participants can find out more about this scheme and how they can get involved.  More importantly this is a chance for Fellows to work closely with students and give insight into work, organisations and help raise individual aspirations.  If you are a Fellow and would like to volunteer register for RSA SkillsBank online and contact Alice Dyke or myself.

Other current RSA SkillsBank pilots include Changemakers (linked to the RSA work with CitizenPower), the Wales Churchill Fellows Advisory project and we are currently discussing collaboration with School Governors’ One-Stop Shop. If Fellows have any other suggestions or ideas for developing the SkillsBank and opportunities to capitilise on the expertise and knowledge Fellowship brings to the table please let me know.  It would be great to hear from you.

 

Vivs Long-Ferguson

Deputy Head of Regional Programme

Twitter @vivslf

 

 

 

 

In pursuit of happiness

‘Happiness’ is a concept that I seem to be increasingly encountering. It is the subject of a piece of work that my colleagues in Arts and Society are involved with in collaboration with the Happy Museum Project, an initiative that is encouraging UK museums to support transition to well-being and sustainability in our society.

The Happy Museum Project was born from psychological research suggesting that happiness and well-being are not related to material wealth. On the contrary, an emphasis on material wealth has led to a focus on the short term, causing the majority to feel pressure to “keep up” and leading to more unhappiness. Key to a sustainable notion of well-being, according to the Happy Museum Project, is what they call ‘support learning for resilience’, which encourages learning that is curiosity driven, engaging, informal and fun and can build resilience, creativity and resourcefulness.

Of course this is not a wholly new concept. We’re becoming increasingly familiar with research that shows that over a certain comfort threshold, increased wealth doesn’t correlate with general satisfaction, take Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, for example, which was developed in the 1970s. Now the UK government has started to focus on the notion of happiness, with the announcement of the National Wellbeing Project in 2010, which will see them attempt to measure how happy Britons are and use the results to shape government policy.

One area where happiness does not seem to have been a central consideration however is in education. Take the new Ofsted framework, which requires inspectors to place emphasis on behaviour, safety and teaching but makes no mention of emotional wellbeing, sociability and support. The aim here may have been to concentrate on the essentials and perhaps the more quantifiable elements, but this only reinforces the lack of regard with which these qualities are held.

Plans for performance related pay for teachers could be taken as another example of overlooking the importance of happiness. Not only is this measure likely to increase pressure on teachers, making them less happy, but their performance is likely to be measured solely on academic results, as it must be, and not well-being. This is not to say that the two will always be unrelated. For example it seems obvious that if a child is taught in a way that is exciting, fun, collaborative and supportive then they will not only be happier but will be more engaged and therefore attain better results. But this policy risks increasing pressure on students to achieve academically, leading to more teaching to the test and so risking children’s well-being.

Additionally some proponents of performance related pay for teachers base their arguments on economics; a good teacher = a good education (good grades) = a good job = more money. Not only in the current climate is this not necessarily the case, as there are not enough good jobs for high achieving students, but if money doesn’t make us happy then we shouldn’t be thinking only about education in these terms.

So I come back to the Happy Museum Project’s central tenet – our culture must focus on the long-term and sustainable benefits of its actions. Whilst achieving good academic results may lead to happiness in the short term, it can no longer guarantee a child’s future well-being in the face of unemployment, recessions and climate change, although perhaps it can help. My point is not to belittle academic achievement, but to emphasise that like so many things, we just cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that having confidence, emotional stability and resilience, will help this generation of students to survive this uncertainty and to cope better, if not always be happy.

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