In this year’s annual survey of parents’ and students’ impressions of school, 96.7% of parents believed that their child was happy at ICHK, and 93% of students confirmed this impression.

I would like to take a few moments to explore why this is more than just fluffy, feel-good data that we should smile at indulgently, before we turn our attention to the survey’s more ‘rigorous’ findings. I will suggest, in fact, that - for very hard-nosed, practical reasons - these figures impart arguably the single most important information about a school, providing, that is, what is desired on behalf of its students is a truly purposeful apprenticeship in learning how to lead healthy and satisfying lives.

In his essay Living Creatively, renowned British paediatrician and psychologist DW Winnicott makes the following observation, “... it is an axiom that children who easily feel that they exist in their own right are the very ones who are easy to manage. These are the ones who are not insulted right, left, and centre by the operation of the Reality Principle.” For those unfamiliar with Winnicott’s style and language, this may seem an obscure statement, requiring some unpacking - but, as I hope to illustrate, the effort is worth it, as the insight he offers is vital to those who seek to educate the young.

For Winnicott, whose career concentrated on unearthing the factors that promote lifelong health and well-being, the preeminent area of interest was early-life experience. It is in infancy, he surmised, that patterns are formed regarding our relationships with other people and with the world in general, patterns which will persist, to one degree or another, for a lifetime.

For most of us, the patterns that emerge during this period consolidate and coalesce so as to occupy a fertile middleground between stability, on the one hand, and flexibility, on the other. Our personalities, our habits, our predispositions, settle and integrate over time, but, in the process of settling and integrating, we do not become rigid, fixed, or brittle. “In order to be and to have the feeling that one is,” Winnicott writes, “one must have a predominance of impulse-doing over reactive-doing.” In other words, to thrive in life, one must feel like an agent, a creator - a person with the capacity to affect one’s world positively through choosing and doing decisively.

This impulse towards creativity begins with the newborn, says Winnicott; “Creativity, then, is the retention through life of something that belongs properly to infant experience: the ability to create the world. For the baby this is not difficult, because if the mother is able to adapt to the baby’s needs, the baby has no appreciation of the fact that the world was there before he or she was conceived or conceived of. The Reality Principle is the fact of the existence of the world whether the baby creates it or not. The Reality Principle is just too bad, but by the time the child is called upon to say “thanks”, big developments have taken place and the child has acquired genetically determined mechanisms for coping with this insult. For the Reality Principle is an insult.”

The Reality Principle, then, is the intrusion of the challenges, obstacles, pratfalls, shortcomings, disappointments, and hindrances of everyday life. The inconveniences, frustrations, contradictions, failures, humiliations that we could well do without, but over which we have no ultimate - or, often, even marginal - control. And, teaches Winnicott, the capacity to marshall a healthy, productive response to these frustrating, unbidden impositions, rather than to be overcome or infuriated by them, resides in the infant’s early experience of world-making in an environment of intimacy and care. In sum, happy babies - happy because they feel well looked after and secure - can manage the mounting challenges of the world comfortably and with confidence.

If you have followed me this far, you will discern, I hope, that we have circled back to where we began, with Winnicott’s axiom: “Children who easily feel that they exist in their own right are the very ones who are easy to manage. These are the ones who are not insulted right, left, and centre by the operation of the Reality Principle.” Winnicott’s point is that children are themselves only recently babies, just as adults are only recently children: each of the later categories still carries the earlier ones inside, and their abiding influence is profound and ceaseless.

Happy, secure children, then, build on and extend the capacities of happy, secure babies. Happy children are not affronted or annihilated by the realities of life - by the need to put to one side their own preferences in the interests of those of other people; by the need to conform to reasonable standards and conventions, enabling a community to thrive; by the need, occasionally, to do what one doesn’t want to do, because one has a greater aim in mind; by the need to respect the views of other people in a space of civil and convivial contestation. By the need, in short, to conceive and enact one’s Self as an active, purposeful, consequential, yet proportionate component of a greater system - a system geared to further one’s own and other people’s goals. Which is to say, to achieve optimally as a well-rounded student at school.

Once this capacity is firmly in the hands of the students, school becomes, for the most part, a breeze for everyone involved. No ‘us and them’, no endless rules to counter (and generate) endless transgressions, no ‘sin bins’, no ‘detentions’, no measuring the length of skirts or outlawing make-up, no bells, no struggles for silence, in fact, very little hassle or bother at all. Just positive, goal-oriented relationships, conducted with mutual respect and understanding, in an environment in which people care about themselves and others, with a shared project in mind. Happiness, truly a magical phenomenon, permits all this, especially, but by no means exclusively, when working with children.