Education for Human Flourishing—A New Conceptual Framework for Promoting Ecosystemic Wellbeing in Schools ^†

Abstract

Debates about the true purpose of education have increased globally in recent years, with climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating interest in the subject. It has become clear that education systems play a vital role not only in shaping the values, mindsets and ethical behaviours that we need for caring and responsible societies, but also in influencing our everyday interactions with the environment. To that end, wellbeing always concerns the triple nature of self, others and the natural world and there is increasing recognition of the need to move from a primary focus on personal happiness and attainment to a more balanced interest in the optimisation of human flourishing within the context of sustainable and regenerative futures. This article introduces the educational work of the Flourish Project, exploring the degree to which schools need to be understood as living systems and the way curricular frameworks, as they currently stand, may be inadvertently contributing to human languishing rather than flourishing. It explains the thinking behind the Flourish Model and describes the way in which the educational aspect of the Flourish Project hopes to contribute not only to the ongoing debate concerning the role of flourishing in education, but also to the growing global interest in the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) as skills and qualities that are vital for purposeful, sustainable, and productive lives.

1. Introduction

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

—Nelson Mandela [1]

Thirteen percent of the world’s adult population are currently estimated to be clinically overweight or obese, which includes 38.2 million children under the age of five. In 2016, one in six Americans was prescribed psychiatric medication and, in the UK, one in six adults experience a common mental health problem, with one in five having considered taking their own life at some point [2,3,4]. According to the UK charity Young Minds, even before COVID-19 one in six children aged five to sixteen were identified as having a probable mental health problem in July 2021, a huge increase from one in nine in 2017. That is an average of five children in every classroom. In the 2018–2019 period, an astonishing 24% of 17-year-olds reported self-harming the previous year, and 7% reported self-harming with suicidal intent at some point in their lives [5]. A recent report on exams in the UK reported that children showed little variance in their levels of wellbeing during exam periods, but in its appendix revealed that:

• 68% of children were unhappy at school;
• 64% did not like themselves;
• 55% did not feel they have a number of good qualities (rising to 68% 90 days after the exam period);
• 53% did not think they can do things as well as other people;
• 58% thought they were not a person of value (rising to 67% over 90 days) [6]

Flourishing is when our inner needs are in a state of cohesive balance with the demands of the external world, enabling us to become aware of and focus on what most interests us and brings us pleasure, to hone, express and share our unique skills and capacities and to functionally optimise our lives—physically, psychologically, socially and spiritually [7,8,9,10]. It involves a strong sense of meaning and purpose, where our work and leisure activities make sense in the context of creative participation within the larger ecosystem. It is always a contextually dynamic process as we adapt and respond to external stimuli in the movement towards and process of integration and growth. This often involves us in periods of challenge and difficulty as we face, seek and overcome our conditioning, fears and limitations.

The positive dimensions of flourishing manifest as the following: physical health and vitality; mental health, positive relationships with others; emotional mastery; environmental mastery; autonomy; self-acceptance; contribution; personal growth; purpose in life; fulfilment of potential and happiness.

Adults with integrated levels of health, where a sustainable balance has been achieved between personal needs and social and environmental pressures, exhibit high levels of vitality and wellbeing. Adults with fragmented levels of health instead exhibit languishing, with low vitality and wellbeing. Some of their needs may be met, but often at the expense of other needs. Languishing is frequently experienced as emptiness and stagnation, often constituting lives of quiet despair. It involves little or no sense of cohesion in one’s life, and an eroded and compromised sense of meaning and purpose, where life seems pointless and of little or no value to the wider world. It is an indication that our wellbeing needs are not being sufficiently met. Languishing is often discussed as primarily consisting of poor mental health [11] but based on the definition of flourishing put forward above it is a systemic issue that indicates that we are unable to achieve the states of balance and integration that are necessary for us to grow and feel whole.

Any education is, in its forms and methods, an outgrowth of the needs of the society in which it exists.

John Dewey [12]

This paper presents the first major contribution of the Flourish Project to the way in which schools might embed whole systems thinking into their wellbeing approaches. It explores schools as living systems within which everyone’s wellbeing matters, and that all human beings have inner and outer lives that need to be integrated for optimal functioning. It promotes the importance of school communities being active participants in the design process and will suggest that over and above personal accomplishment and attainment, effective learning should be about being able to live good and meaningful lives.

The objective of the first pilot studies is to:

(a)

Evaluate the use of the Flourish Model to support whole systems thinking;

(b)

Initiate whole school conversations about the conditions that nurture or inhibit human wellbeing/flourishing;

(c)

Actively engage schools in helping to shape and refine the wellbeing indicators;

(d)

Develop a practical and implementable digital resource for the initial pilot schools;

(e)

Initiate discussions around the way such a digital platform might then be further revised and structured for practical implementation in state schools at a global scale;

(f)

Explore the way the model could be used to promote the Inner Development Goals (IDGs);

(g)

Actively contribute to current global conversations on unitive thinking and planetary health.

The pilot studies are experimental and involve both qualitative and quantitative research, with original data collected through online surveys, participative webinars with the participating schools and datasets from the Nurture Digital Platform. The population involves those schools that have agreed to become early adopters of the pilot studies and that are members of the existing global client base of ORAH.com. The intention is for the results to then be actively shared and discussed with other expert groups that are working in the field, including the educational working groups of the Human Flourishing Programme at Harvard University.

2. The Role of Education in Flourishing

Education matters for people at all stages of life. But what is the purpose of education? This quintessential question must be asked before we can assess if our education systems are delivering on their promise. Should the goal of education be to develop human flourishing, or should it be to meet the demands of ‘homo economicus’?

UNESCO, 2022

The need to shift focus in education away from personal attainment and towards flourishing is now being discussed by many major organisations. The OECD talks of students needing to ‘act with a sense of purpose, which guides them to flourish and thrive in society’ [13]. The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues holds that ‘flourishing is the widely accepted goal of life’ [14]. Positive Psychology holds that ‘flourishing is the goal of education’ [15]. and The Church of England (CofE) states that ‘education is … at its heart, about human flourishing’ [16]. The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University includes several working groups in its Flourishing Network focusing on education [17].

Influential advocates of theories on human happiness and flourishing include Amartya Sen [18,19], Richard Layard [20],Martin Seligman [21], Felicity Huppert [22], Harry Brighouse [23], Doret de Ruyter [24], Lynne Wolbert [25], Michael Reiss and John White [26], and Tyler J. VanderWeele [27,28,29].

Education is essential for flourishing, in that it contributes to the evolutionary growth process through the acquisition of the knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and worldviews necessary to survive in a complex world with others [30]. It facilitates the transmission of cultural heritage from one generation to the next and, when at its best, enables the compassionate deconstruction of what has gone before to serve the emergent needs of the future. At this time in human history, when we are facing climate change, a financial crisis and global destabilisation, education has never been more important. Education needs to adapt to the most pressing needs of any time; as John Dewey wrote in 1923, education ‘should never come to an end’ [31]—it should be continuously evolving in response to the needs of society and the planet.

What has so far been missing from the global dialogue, however, is the vital role of optimising the early conditions needed to optimise states of wellbeing, something that has recently been acknowledged by UNESCO, together with how to maintain and achieve the states of autonomous motivation or energetic flow that are prevalent in early childhood and indicative of human flourishing, yet are rarely examined and promoted within schooling systems. Flow is when our unique skills and capacities are stretched to meet the demands of the environment. Flow is discussed in more detail in Section 4. From a schooling perspective, flow is facilitated when students are able to seek out from the environment those elements that most attract or interest them and are given the time and space to follow these interests and to express their own knowledge, creativity and individuality.

UNESCO’s 2022 International Science and Evidence-based Education Assessment (ISEEA), which supports its recently published Futures of Education report [32] discusses the purpose of education and challenges the current state of imbalance, calling for the implementation of large-scale flourishing assessments in schools. The report states that

These findings clearly point to the current imbalance in the educational system—overemphasis on academic performance and insufficient focus on supporting student flourishing, with academic pressures often undermining student flourishing. Inclusion of large-scale regular flourishing assessments in schools, and their results being considered in evaluations of school provisions, may help bring flourishing to the central stage of educational policy.

[33]

The report seeks to separate flourishing aims and manifestations into those that support the conditions of flourishing and those that provide the capacities for flourishing, stating that ‘The promotion of flourishing should be multi-scalar, and advance from micro to macro, that is, from the level of the individual student and teacher to that of policy, and vice versa’—with relationship as core to the whole process. It identifies a number of curricular domains that underpin the process (Figure 1).

The ISEEA suggests that the above framework might lend itself to considering various assessment practices that could be introduced to each of the curricular domains, from a schooling perspective to a policymaking perspective, and goes on to offer some specific suggestions:

Merely offering some illustrative examples, in the environment domain we would hope to see more sustainability practice; in the cultural curricular domain, more reading of literature, growing interest in arts; in the social domain, improved literacy, economic growth and higher rates of voting; in the technological domain, wiser consumption of news and reduced rates in consumption of unethical content; in the interpersonal domain, reduction in racism and growing inclusion; in the personal domain, higher levels of wellbeing, health, satisfaction and meaning in life.

The relationship between student and teacher is core to the process of flourishing, with the teacher providing a link between the student and the wider curricular domains. As Parker Palmer says in The Heart of a Teacher:

We need to open a new frontier in our exploration of good teaching: the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. To chart that landscape fully, three important paths must be taken–intellectual, emotional, and spiritual–and none can be ignored. Reduce teaching to intellect and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual and it loses its anchor to the world. Intellect, emotion, and spirit depend on each other for wholeness. They are interwoven in the human self and in education at its best, and we need to interweave them in our pedagogical discourse as well.

(1997) [34]

However, the relationships that students, teachers and schools have with parents is also essential. Several studies have shown that positive parent–child relationships are directly related to learning engagement and improved mental health [35,36,37,38].

3. A New Ecological Wellbeing Framework

Through revealing the interconnected nature of human development, evolution, behaviour and sustainability, the Flourish Model aims to provide an interdisciplinary road map explaining the relational foundations of human capacities and potential, and the way these promote and optimise sustainable wellbeing. It promotes the need for a new ‘ecology of wellbeing’ that better conveys the vital importance of protecting early development with our need to understand human flourishing as a dynamic and highly interconnected process, between the self, others, and the natural world.

The Flourish Model was initially inspired by the Seven Levels of Consciousness Model put forward by leadership expert Richard Barrett [39] which was itself an extension of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs [40]. The Model proposes that the dynamics of natural systems are reflected in seven core aspects to human flourishing which need to be fully acknowledged and incorporated for us to be supported in becoming the best version of ourselves. These are the energetic drivers of human motivations and development that invite us to actively engage with our environments and they are further shaped and defined by the unique experiences that we all have as individuals. They reflect our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs as human beings.

The seven aspects are:

• Security;
• Relationship;
• Independence;
• Engagement;
• Fulfilment;
• Contribution;
• Growth.

Depending on our unique environmental experiences, these become the dispositions, beliefs, values and mindsets that create our individual maps of the world. The measures we have designed to reflect these seven aspects of wellbeing are summarised below (Figure 2 and Figure 3).

The Flourish Model proposes that we do not live in isolation, but always need to understand ourselves as unique elements within a wider social ecosystem (Figure 4).

Not only that, but we are further embedded within the natural world and there is a relational ‘ecological self’ that needs to be recognised and better understood. The construct of the ecological self is illustrated below (Figure 5).

In this way, the model seeks to unite the work of the early psychologists and pedagogues (Montessori [41], Maslow [42] Bronfenbrenner [43] Deci [44] and Ryan [45] with the more cutting-edge thinking of contemporary figures such as Jack Shonkoff [46], Carol Dweck [47], James Heckman [48], Elinor Ostrom [49], David Sloan Wilson [50], Fritjof Capra [51,52], Peter Senge [53], Otto Scharmer [54], Gabor Mate [55] and Keri Facer [56]. It illustrates that the academic evidence itself needs to be understood and applied using a ‘whole systems’ perspective, and this includes the Indigenous call for ways of being in the world that are aligned with natural systems and processes and that honour states of messiness, difficulty and unpredictability as essential for human learning and growth [57,58].

The Model encourages more profound explorations into what causes and perpetuates states of languishing and diminished vitality rather than focusing only on what supports and measures states of attainment and positive functioning (Jahoda) [59]. It also moves the axis away from states of mental health to the more integrated and interesting dynamic of optimised values, dispositions, skills, capacities and potentialities which, when fully balanced, it suggests is experienced as ‘flow’ [60]. As such, it fully aligns with UNESCO’s own focus in aiming to show that individual wellbeing is always relational.

From an ecological perspective, it holds that we need to seek to balance skills and abilities with the cultivation of the kind of attitudes and values that we need to see in the world. In other words, we need a fully integrated approach that acknowledges that our own survival may depend on the decisions that we take at this time. There is a common acknowledgement that the old models of wellbeing, which focused on one aspect of the system, all too often at the expense of others, are no longer either valid or sustainable. There is also an acknowledgement that flourishing is a dynamic and lifelong process that incorporates the more transitory psychological state of happiness, but that, more fundamentally, involves personal struggle, difficulty and the overcoming of past obstacles, limitations, and fears. We are complex beings living in a complex world.

4. Flow

The input, throughput and output processes of living systems are always trying to achieve the state of energetic homeostasis or optimal functioning of energetic flow. They spontaneously include the emergence of new forms of order at points of instability. Continuous learning, adaptation and development are key characteristics of the behaviour of all living systems, as we try to optimise our own development within the context of the larger system. Creativity is fundamental to the process. As the system theorist Fritjof Capra says in his 2018 book The Hidden Connections [61]:

This spontaneous emergence of new order at critical points of instability, which is nowadays often referred to just as “emergence,” is the key characteristic of dynamic self-organization, and is in fact one of the hallmarks of life. It has been recognized as the underlying dynamic of development, of learning, and of evolution. In other words, creativity—the generation of new forms of order—is a key property of all living systems. Nature always reaches out into new territory to create novelty.

Perhaps the activity that we most associate with flow during childhood is play, but from a psychological point of view, work and play are not opposites, and what matters is the intense involvement of the participant in an experience that gives them both meaning and purpose [62]. This is the essence of intrinsic (rather than extrinsic) motivation. Play is so important to human beings because it allows us to generatively reach out into novelty without the risk of being overly judged by others as ‘failing’ or the need to achieve a specific externally imposed result.

Finding individual meaning and purpose in our lives is essential, but from a systems perspective, this has a collaborative aspect where personal maturation is linked to the needs of broader society. Natural systems always provide maximum freedom of their parts to invite in novelty, but also promote maximum coherence (health or vitality) of the whole. Structure is the springboard for creativity (both generative and adaptive) and leads to flow within the system.

In a flow state, the achievement of goals is no longer the only priority. Rather, the freedom from having to focus on any specific end result allows the individual to escape the confines of boredom or the concern about being judged and to fully enjoy the learning process. In this way, the experience itself becomes immensely fulfilling, but this does not necessarily equate with simple pleasure, for many flow activities are, to all intents and purposes, immensely complex, time-consuming and even frustrating. It is all about finding the balance between environmental challenge and personal capacities and each individual responds to this in their unique way. This is something that was of profound interest to the early pedagogue Maria Montessori, who saw that adult interventions were constantly interrupting the natural learning cycles of children [63].

We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at the time when a child is just beginning to be active; perhaps we suffocate life itself.

Later on, psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi [64] showed that flow states are achieved through balancing external environmental challenges with the optimisation of internal skills and capacities (Figure 6).

It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows.

Csikszentmihalyi broke flow and what is required to achieve it down into the following characteristics [65]:

• Complete concentration on the task;
• Clarity of goals and rewards;
• Immediate feedback;
• Time dilation;
• The experience is intrinsically rewarding;
• Effortlessness and ease;
• There is a balance between challenge and skills, such that skills have to be stretched to meet the challenge;
• Actions and awareness are merged, losing self-conscious rumination;
• A feeling of control.

There is currently a growing interest in the neurobiology of flow [66] and the way we can achieve states of ‘peak performance’ [67]. There is also growing interest in ‘group flow’ and the power of collaboration to generate innovation. Examples include Keith Sawyer’s Group Genius [68] and Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer’s work on presencing and emergence [69].

As Steven Kotler, the founder of the Flow Research Collective, writes, Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness—one where we feel our best and perform our best—it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living [70,71].

From the perspective of the Flourish Project, this involves exploring the difference between optimising our functioning and performance as individuals and the need for us to understand the impact of our own decisions on the wellbeing and sustainability of the system as a whole. It also involves being curious about the difference between the states of flow needed to achieve the optimal individual functioning and performance ultimately associated with ‘self-actualization’, those that occur in coherent group situations, and the states of peak experience and ‘self-transcendence’ that lift us fully away from our individuated sense of self to being one with a larger unified field—something that Maslow was interested in towards the end of his life [72]:

Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.

(Maslow, 1971, p. 269.)

Flow remains, however, a subject that is poorly explored in schools and an area that has considerable possibilities for future research.

5. Authenticity and Vulnerability

Flourishing is, therefore, all about achieving a right or ‘authentic’ relationship—with yourself, with others and the natural world. Authenticity and vulnerability (i.e., being able to openly share your own thoughts and emotions) is fundamental to this process and is essential for meaningful human interactions and experience. Vulnerability involves emotional exposure, opens us up to being seen through the eyes of others and is deeply connected to our sense of self-worth. Very early on in life we learn that our feelings of worth are tied up with external perceptions and value measurements relating to who we are, and that being authentic can therefore be dangerous. The dilemma is that we are always being pulled towards self-expression and wholeness, and for us to flourish we need to be supported in letting go of all the fears that may have been holding us back. Flourishing is therefore not about being perfect but is, instead, about being supremely human. The inner guide in each of us is always looking for opportunities to bring our minds, emotions and bodies into connection and wholeness with the dynamics of the natural world. There is a natural energy of integration that invites us to let go of our individual and conditioned selves and to unite with the emergent and dynamic patterns and principles of the larger system.

Evolutionary science shows us that there is more to life than psychological wellbeing. Individuals flourish when they are physically healthy and secure, have warm and trusting relationships, have a sense of personal agency, can engage positively with the environment, can creatively express themselves, feel a sense of purpose, belonging and contribution and can learn and grow throughout the lifespan [73]. In other words, we are dynamic cultural beings, and we need to constantly balance and harmonise our internal experiences through the quality of our relationship with others and the environments that we live within. This includes the development of self-awareness and the prosocial moral and ethical capacities that we need for a sustainable future.

The Flourish Model celebrates the contribution of the leading thinkers to our understanding of human wellbeing, but highlights the danger of an over-focus on the psychological health of the individual rather than the optimisation of all the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects that combine to create more balanced states of functioning. This is something that is being explored by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, whose measures of wellbeing currently include the following five domains: happiness and life satisfaction; mental and physical health; meaning and purpose; character and virtue, and close social relationships [74]. Wellness is never just about our individual functioning, but also includes our social and environmental contexts.

Numerous studies show that excessive focus on personal attainment or achievement without the balance of contributing to something bigger than ourselves produces lives that are materially impressive, but lack the deeper meaning and purpose that emotional connection to something beyond ourselves provides. As Helen Street writes in her 2018 book Contextual Wellbeing: Creating Positive Schools from the Inside Out [75]:

Well-being is not simply about individual expressions of thoughts, feelings and behaviours; it is not an isolated or solitary pursuit. It is just as much about the connections we form with others, the tasks we pursue and our wider sense of the world. Wellbeing concerns our ‘being well’ as social beings, not just human beings. It is about creating and reacting to a social context in a healthy and positive way. Ultimately lasting well-being and happiness have far less to do with any aspect of our individual functioning than we might like to think, and far more to do with the spaces between us.

We thrive when our lives make sense in terms of the whole, when we feel held, understood and valued by the communities within which we live and when we can express our own skills, abilities and understanding as we develop and grow.

6. Education and Sustainability

Outside of families and communities, education systems are the key influencers on the ways we learn to think about ourselves, others and the natural world. They inform us about what our cultures value the most and significantly shape our subsequent motivations and behaviours. They profoundly shape our sense of personal agency, worth and wellbeing and either promote or inhibit what we feel is possible in terms of personal aspiration.

The promotion of new and more ecosystemic models of education has tremendous potential to optimise personal, societal and planetary wellbeing, to better prepare children for the rapidly changing future of work and to distribute opportunities for agency more equitably. This can support the empowerment of young people to shape the future now, to enhance social mobility and to promote more participative, engaged and harmonious societies which pay closer attention to wellbeing beyond individualistic success. In this way, schooling and education systems would be understood as simply one element of the wider ecosystem of a lifelong journey, within which personal meaning and ongoing growth is acknowledged as essential for human and planetary wellbeing. They would represent a crucial element in promoting our need to live regeneratively and in right relationship for a sustainable world.

In 2021, the influential Dasgupta Review [76] (Box 1) called for the transformation of our institutions and systems—particularly finance and education—to enable such changes and sustain them for future generations, asserting that this should include increasing public and private ‘financial flows’ that enhanced natural assets and decreasing those that degraded nature.

Box 1. Dasgupta Review, The Economics of Biodiversity, 2021.

Although the sense of transcendence that Nature invokes may still exist everywhere, it has taken a severe beating in modern times…That need not have been. Correct economic reasoning is entangled with our values. Biodiversity does not only have instrumental value, it also has intrinsic worth—perhaps even moral worth. Each of these senses is enriched when we recognise that we are embedded in Nature. To detach Nature from economic reasoning is to imply that we consider ourselves to be external to Nature. The fault is not in economics; it lies in the way we have chosen to practise it.

Dasgupta Review, 2021

Such new thinking aligns with the current interest in balancing the external UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) [77] and suggests that, to become more aware, we need to explore both the inner and outer aspects of human societies. This involves understanding the world on two fundamental levels. First, understanding the world from the ‘inside-out’: the way our own backgrounds, experiences, values, thoughts and emotions influence our personal behaviour, activities and impact on the world. Second, understanding the world from ‘outside-in’: the way the external pressures and expectations of the systems that we live within (i.e., the quality of the natural environment, our families, communities, political and religious systems and cultures) influence our physical health, thoughts, emotions, values and behaviours. As Wilson-Strydom and Walker explore in a 2015 article, there are both personal and relational aspects that always need to be taken into account:

Flourishing “in” education requires consideration of the well-being and agency of students. Flourishing “through” education draws attention to the role of education in promoting well-being and flourishing beyond its walls by fostering a social and moral consciousness among students.

(Wilson-Strydom, Merridy; Walker, Melanie, 2015) [78]

7. A Collaborative and Inclusive Approach to Assessment

As in inclusive approach, the initiative celebrates the rich diversity of contributions to the field of human wellbeing in the last two decades and has been developing a range of resources to support schools in adopting a ‘whole school’ way of thinking and to encourage prosociality. It further endorses the global call for the need to move away from extrinsic value and reward systems, based primarily on individual achievement and performance, to more intrinsic and autonomous forms of motivation that underpin deep learning and growth [79]. In addition, it endorses the findings of the UNESCO ISEE Assessment report in that:

The intertwined character of flourishing and education also shows that flourishing is a hybrid concept: the development of human potentials that make life a human life must inform education (the naturalistic quality of flourishing), but the worlds in which these potentials are fostered are different (cultural-dependent) and good education takes into account that children can develop different ways of living well related to their specific potentials and their ideas and preferences about how they want to live in the world (agent-relative).

and which reveals flourishing as a multi-systemic process (Figure 7).

The Flourish Model incorporates all seventeen of the SDGs. The Flourish Project initiative has worked with international partners to develop handbooks for Early Year and Primary/Elementary Settings. It is currently developing new resources that are aligned to the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) and is actively working with partners to develop a new ecological narrative that will cut across disciplines.

As well as providing a standalone framework, the model provides a way of mapping other approaches and forms of wellbeing assessment to support existing initiatives and to show the different areas of focus within an ecological context. This has proved to be particularly useful to endorse approaches that schools are already using, or to show where there might be excessive focus on certain aspects at the expense of others. Its core principles include:

• Human beings have physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs that all need to be nurtured for optimal functioning.
• Wellbeing is relational, in that we are always influencing, and being influenced, by (i) the social world of others and (ii) the natural environment.
• Wellbeing is contextual, in that our individual wellbeing is always impacted by the authenticity and values of the communities in which we participate.
• Wellbeing is dynamic, in that our systems are always trying to self-optimise by balancing our inner and outer worlds.

8. Digital Wellbeing Platform

The Flourish Model is currently being beta-tested in the development of a new Digital Wellbeing Platform that aims to support schools in developing whole school thinking. The platform will provide a range of survey questions for everyone in the system (including students, leadership teams, teaching and administrative staff, parents and carers) and will offer the ability to customise wellbeing assessment templates so that measures can be precisely tailored to the contextual needs of the school, local authority, city or state. All the survey questions have been mapped across the Flourish Models Seven Levels of Wellbeing (Appendix A).

The initiative is supporting the development of collaborative research partnership arrangements with schools, to move the emphasis away from ‘tick-box wellbeing’ to the development of datasets that have real value and benefit over time. It is actively exploring how best to tackle the ethical implications of collecting longitudinal data.

The items, scales and survey questions being used in the development of the Orah Nurture Wellbeing Platform were created over a two-year period involving original expert contribution, an academic literature review of wellbeing indicators [80], an analysis of existing wellbeing frameworks currently being used worldwide [81], and a range of conversations with experts across disciplines. The intention is to further develop these in consultation with the participating schools.

9. The Pilot Process

The pilot process will be actively shaped through academic consultation, active research collaborations with participant schools and the key collaborators involvement in leading educational forums, including the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, the Charter for Compassion, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and the SDG Thought Leaders’ Circle.

The platform is currently being beta-tested and developed though the partner’s existing relationship with some of the leading schools in the world, with the long-term aim of the final versions of the product being made fully accessible to state schools. The beta product currently includes Mood Maps, Survey Scales and Questions and a range of customisable templates and reports (Figure 8, Figure 9 and Figure 10). The partnership is also exploring the development of a personal wellbeing app, for all participants within the school system, that will facilitate the confidential mapping of each person’s states of wellbeing over time in order to support their holistic wellbeing outside of the school system.

One of the unique features offered through the platform is the degree of customisation available to participating schools who wish to further tailor the suggested sets of surveys to fit the contextual needs of their own settings. This is a potential innovation in the field, as most frameworks currently limit assessments to a predefined set of questions tied to the particular chosen version. There is recognition, however, that this will complicate the ability to conduct comparative assessments across settings and the project plans to work with school leadership teams to further explore this.

Feedback from the pilot studies will then be used to:

• Explore how best to initiate school-wide discussions on the Triple Nature of Wellbeing (self, others and the natural world);
• Show how everyone’s individual wellbeing matters to the whole;
• Provide valuable insights into the dynamic nature of states of wellbeing;
• Inform the selection, development and implementation of new targeted interventions;
• Facilitate the ongoing design of optimised tools and templates;
• Contribute to global discussions on the role of education in human flourishing;
• Debate the importance of ‘flow’ for optimal functioning;
• Create a collaborative research network of school leaders.

10. Conclusions and Pedagogical Implications

The emerging global interest in human flourishing is providing the field of education with an increasingly significant approach that warrants further multi-disciplinary research and development for stakeholders around the world. It encourages the move away from systems that limit human wellness and potential to those that recognise learning as fundamentally a relational process that involves more meaningful, ethical and relevant curriculum content. It provides policy-relevant evidence and recommendations that challenge narrow definitions of success and that promote learning as a lifelong process that is essential for the creation of peaceful and regenerative societies. It shows that we all have inner lives that need to be nurtured, that the wellbeing of parents, leadership teams and teaching staff is essential for flourishing schools, and that education systems across the world are now moving towards a transformative period of development where personal wellness is intricately woven into the wellness of others and the planet.

In this pivotal time of existential threat and evolutionary potential, it will be essential that our educational systems move beyond the current focus on the attainment of the individual to acknowledge that we are all embedded in larger systems and that the wellbeing of each element impacts on the whole. They will need to reflect a unitive understanding of what it means to be human, that schools are living systems with their own unique environmental contexts and needs, and that we have a mutual responsibility as stewards and co-creators of the future.

The project is currently entering its proof of concept/pilot development phase. Through its partnered educational activities, the Flourish Project hopes to (a) help open up this dialogue and (b) develop tools and resources to accelerate the process, with the ORAH.com digital wellbeing platform providing an early example.