Problem addressed

Educational institutions play a central role not only in academic development but also in children’s and young people’s emotional, social and psychological well-being. However, many educators and institutions lack a coherent, age-appropriate and practically applicable framework for promoting mental health and well-being as part of everyday education. Support is often limited to isolated activities, short-term interventions or the involvement of external professionals after difficulties have already emerged.

Children and young people need regular opportunities to learn how to recognise and regulate emotions, manage stress, develop self-confidence, use their personal strengths, build supportive relationships, resolve conflicts and navigate digital environments consciously. Access to such development may depend heavily on the resources, professional capacity and geographical location of the individual institution. Educators also need practical methods, professional preparation and ongoing peer support to respond confidently to students’ emotional and social needs without being expected to act as therapists.

The challenge is therefore both individual and systemic. Mental health promotion cannot remain solely the responsibility of individual children, families or specialists. It requires an educational culture in which well-being, emotional literacy, supportive relationships and healthy coping strategies become shared priorities and part of everyday practice. The programme addresses this gap by making preventive mental health promotion accessible in the everyday environments where children and young people learn and develop, while actively supporting educators in implementing and sustaining these practices.

Within the programme, happiness does not mean a permanently positive mood or the avoidance of difficult emotions. It refers to a set of psychological and social capacities that can be developed—including emotional regulation, positive orientation, optimism, perseverance, healthy relationships and adaptive coping—and which can function as protective factors throughout life.

Difficulties in emotional regulation may be expressed through impulsivity, aggression, withdrawal or anxiety. They may also negatively affect peer relationships, conflict management, school readiness, concentration and academic engagement. Without early and systematic support, children may reach adolescence without the internal resources needed to manage increasing social, educational and psychological pressures.

Innovative solution

Happiness Lessons Integrated Programmes translates research-based well-being promotion into an educational model that trained educators can implement within the day-to-day life of kindergartens and schools. Its innovation lies in moving beyond isolated interventions and combining structured curricula, educator capacity-building, age-specific experiential learning, institutional commitment, family engagement, professional networking and continuous development within one scalable framework.

Rather than functioning as a conventional school subject, the programme creates experiential learning situations in which children and young people practise evidence-informed behaviours and mental strategies through discussion, play, movement, music, creative activities, reflection and shared experiences.

The integrated model comprises seven complementary programme pathways covering more than 50 developmentally adapted topics:

1. Happiness Lessons Core Programme: Over a ten-month cycle, children and young people explore and practise happiness-enhancing strategies such as gratitude, optimism, positive relationships, acts of kindness, goal-setting, coping, forgiveness, physical activity and sustainable well-being.
2. Character Strengths Programme: The programme helps students recognise, appreciate and consciously apply their own character strengths in learning, relationships, everyday challenges and conflict situations.
3. Competence-Based Self-Confidence Programme: Built on the scientific foundations of growth mindset and self-compassion, the programme strengthens positive self-image, self-efficacy, perseverance and a constructive response to mistakes and difficulties.
4. Mindfulness Programme for Emotional Regulation and Attention Control: Designed for children aged 3–10, the programme develops attention control, emotional awareness and age-appropriate self-regulation through playful and experiential activities.
5. Stress Mindset Programme: Young people learn to understand their responses to stress and mobilise the energy associated with stress so that it supports rather than paralyses them in challenging situations.
6. Positive Communication and Conflict Resolution Programme: By developing assertive communication and restorative approaches to conflict, the programme aims to prevent peer bullying, strengthen cooperation and contribute to a supportive institutional climate.
7. Digital Well-being Programme: The programme supports children and young people in developing a more conscious, balanced and responsible relationship with digital devices, online platforms and social media.

Together, these pathways address happiness-enhancing strategies, character strengths, self-confidence, growth mindset and self-compassion, emotional regulation and attention control, adaptive responses to stress, positive communication, restorative conflict resolution and conscious digital engagement. The seven programmes and their main objectives are consistent with the programme’s current integrated framework.

Educators receive practice-oriented professional training and structured resources that can be adapted to the developmental level, educational setting and specific needs of their groups. The activities use stories, games, movement, music, relaxation, creative work, reflection and collaborative projects, making preventive mental health promotion accessible without turning educators into therapists or the programme into clinical treatment.

The programme also changes relationships among stakeholders. Educators move from being primarily recipients of external support to becoming trained facilitators of well-being development within their own institutions. Children and young people become active participants who practise, reflect on and discuss strategies relevant to their own lives. Parents, school leaders, researchers, mentors and professional communities are connected around a shared responsibility for well-being.

Educators can participate in online workshops and in-person events, exchange experiences through professional forums, publish and learn from implementation reports, and access mentoring, supervision and peer support. These opportunities strengthen their sense of professional community and connect them to a national and increasingly international practitioner network.

This approach creates lasting capacity within educational institutions. The knowledge, resources and practices remain available after the initial training and can gradually influence classroom communication, conflict management, relationships, school climate and institutional culture.

Key results and benefits

The programme has grown from a Hungarian educational initiative into a large-scale professional and institutional network with national reach and international implementation. Its current results include:

• more than 150,000 children and young people reached;
• more than 9,000 educators involved;
• more than 1,800 participating educational institutions;
• implementation in eight countries;
• age-adapted materials for four educational stages, complemented by resources for learners with special educational needs and learning difficulties;
• more than 63,000 educator implementation reports uploaded to the programme platform.

The programme’s effectiveness has been examined through two large-sample, longitudinal, controlled studies conducted in 2016 and 2025 by the Positive Psychology Research Group of Eötvös Loránd University, involving almost 1,000 students. The studies compared participating students with control groups before and after the school-year programme.

The findings identified significant positive changes in participants’ emotional, cognitive and psychological functioning. Students taking part in the programme demonstrated stronger positive emotional orientation, optimism, confidence in the future, self-compassion, self-confidence, self-efficacy, flexible adaptation, problem-solving and creative thinking. The results also indicated reduced anxiety. Compared with their control-group peers, participating students were more focused, persistent, creative and socially open, while their coping capacity, resilience and psychological immunity were also strengthened.

Qualitative feedback from educators complements these research findings. Participating teachers report improvements in classroom atmosphere, cooperation, conflict management, problem-solving, perseverance and students’ ability to recover from difficulties. Further research and implementation experience have also explored the programme’s relevance for learners with learning difficulties, the development of a positive classroom climate, social sensitivity and the prevention of peer victimisation.

At institutional level, the programme:

• provides educators with a practical and immediately applicable mental health promotion toolkit;
• strengthens professional confidence and reflective pedagogical practice;
• supports more open communication about emotions, needs and difficulties;
• encourages inclusive, supportive and cooperative classroom relationships;
• creates a professional community in which educators exchange experiences and learn from one another;
• helps institutions move from isolated well-being activities towards a coherent, preventive and sustainable whole-school approach.

The programme has also received significant external recognition. It received the Silver Award of the OTP Fáy Foundation Educational Innovation Award in 2024, was selected for the HundrED Global Collection in both 2025 and 2026, and was included in HundrED’s Wellbeing in Schools Spotlight as one of 15 highly impactful and scalable school well-being innovations selected from more than 300 nominations.

Potential for mainstreaming

Happiness Lessons Integrated Programmes has strong potential for further transfer, upscaling and mainstreaming. Its transferability is supported by more than a decade of large-scale implementation, educator feedback, its adaptation in different educational settings and countries, and international recognition of its impact and scalability. The methodology is sufficiently standardised to support consistent quality while remaining flexible enough to respond to different educational, cultural and institutional contexts.

The model’s transferable core consists of educator training, structured annual programme pathways, age-specific educational resources, experiential activities, implementation guidance, mentoring, peer learning and professional community support. These components enable educational institutions to build their own internal capacity rather than depending on the permanent on-site involvement of external specialists.

The model can be mainstreamed into:

• the pedagogical programmes, mental health strategies and whole-school well-being policies of kindergartens and schools;
• initial teacher education and continuing professional development;
• local, regional and national mental health promotion and prevention strategies;
• social inclusion and equal-access initiatives;
• bullying prevention, restorative conflict management, school climate and digital well-being policies;
• programmes serving rural, disadvantaged, special-needs and other underserved educational settings;
• non-formal educational and community-based programmes for children, young people and families.

Its modular design allows institutions to begin with one programme pathway or a limited number of themes and gradually progress towards a comprehensive whole-school model. Activities can be integrated into daily, weekly or monthly educational practice and adapted for classroom lessons, thematic school projects, community events, parent activities and non-formal learning settings. Digitally accessible resources that can also be implemented offline support adoption by institutions with different levels of infrastructure and financial capacity.

A transferable implementation process can include the preparation of educators, the selection of programme pathways according to local needs, the contextual and cultural adaptation of materials, mentored implementation, peer exchange, documentation of practice and ongoing reflection on outcomes. Common training standards, implementation guidelines and impact-measurement tools can help preserve the programme’s essential principles while allowing local adaptation.

Implementation in eight countries provides initial evidence that the programme’s central principles and methods can be translated and adapted beyond Hungary. Its scalability has also been externally recognised by HundrED, which selected the programme for its Global Collection in 2025 and 2026 and included it among 15 highly impactful and scalable school well-being innovations in its Wellbeing in Schools Spotlight.

Further European mainstreaming could be supported through multilingual implementation packages, partnerships with teacher-training institutions, universities, educational authorities and civil society organisations, as well as the development of local facilitators, mentors and professional learning communities. Cross-sector cooperation with academic and private-sector partners can also contribute to research, long-term sustainability and wider access.

The long-term objective is not simply to increase the number of individual Happiness Lessons, but to embed preventive mental health promotion, emotional skill development and sustainable well-being into educational culture. In this way, children and young people can encounter supportive, strength-focused and emotionally responsive learning environments throughout their development, rather than receiving well-being support only through isolated or short-term interventions.