Mindfulness and PSHE in schools

I would like to use my blog space this week to discuss a phenomenon that I find very interesting. This is the introduction of mindfulness practice into schools and education. More broadly, this relates to the degree to which we believe schools and the educational establishment have a role to play in a student’s wellbeing and personal development.

Mindfulness has been defined as the “application of pure, nonreactive awareness to immediate experience” (Brown, 2006), and as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment” (Kabat-Zinn, 2003, p. 145). You can find out more about mindfulness from our very own Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice.

Mindfulness has been the subject of extensive interest in the scientific literature over the last decade or more, in large part, owing to the relative ease with which this traditional Buddhist practice has been able to be translated into a secular tool of demonstrable clinical utility. This initially emerged in the form of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an intervention originally formulated for the treatment of chronic pain (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).  Since then, with the emergence of randomised controlled trials, the practise has been shown to bring about significant improvements in a wide range of areas of clinical interest (Baer, 2003).

These benefits exist across a number of dimensions, from cognitive function, in terms of improvements in focused and selective attention (e.g. Jha, Krompinger, & Baime, 2007; Tang et al., 2007); to mental health, such as the reduction of symptoms of distress as demonstrated in both clinical and non-clinical populations (e.g. Jha et al., 2007; Ma & Teasdale, 2004; Speca, Carlson, Goodey & Angen, 2000; Williams, Kolar, Reger, & Pearson, 2001); the enhancement of wellbeing, in terms of positive mood (Nyklicek & Kuijpers, 2008; Shapiro, Oman & Thoresen, 2008), self-esteem and optimism (Bowen et al., 2006) and self-compassion and empathy (Shapiro, Schwartz, & Bonner, 1998; Shapiro, Brown, & Biegel, 2007); and also in the realms of physical health, relating to improvements in the capacity to manage chronic pain (e.g. Grossman, Tiefenthaler-Gilmer, Raysz, & Kesper, 2007; Morone, Greco, & Weiner, 2008), improved neuroendocrine and immune functioning (Davidson et al., 2003; Tang et al., 2007) and improvements in health-related behaviours such as reductions in binge eating (Kristeller & Hallett, 1999) and substance misuse (Bowen et al., 2006).

Now, a project has emerged in the UK, directed by the Oxford Mindfulness Centre at Oxford University and the Cambridge Wellbeing Institute at Cambridge, to consider whether mindfulness practices could be of benefit in the educational setting.

To my knowledge (let me know if you are aware of any others), only one study has been done looking at the efficacy of mindfulness to produce the kind of benefits in the educational setting as it has done in others. The principal finding of this study was a positive correlation between the amount of mindfulness practice time, and the experienced improvement in subjective wellbeing.

As the authors discuss in the above paper, though there have been efforts made within schools to place an emphasis on the wellbeing of the student as a whole (such as with the introduction of ‘Personal, Social and Health Education’ (PSHE) classes into the curriculum in 2008), the idealised outcome measures of these interventions are usually negative (i.e. the reduction of a particular variable, such as depressive symptoms or bullying). Common sense dictates, however, that preventative interventions in the PSHE realm, ones that focus on the enhancement of those variables (wellbeing, self-efficacy, improved attention, empathy, prosocial behaviour, for example) that are likely to obviate the emergence of others that might later be the necessary focus of reduction efforts, would surely be the optimal approach to kids’ wellbeing and personal development (obviously, in company with retained interventions aimed at the reduction of negative behaviours if and when they might arise).

Mindfulness is definitely the kind of intervention that takes this positive approach. That is, it focuses on the enhancement of a range of positive outcomes, yet also has been shown to hold significant benefits in the reduction of problem behaviours. Perhaps then it might be considered as having a potentially significant contribution to make to the PSHE agenda?

Another factor that rises in my mind around all this is dual, and relates to the fact that a large number of parents might place little or no emphasis on the child’s sense of wellbeing, personal efficacy, empathy and prosocial behaviour, nor on their capacity to institute proactive methods in their daily life to improve them. This, when tied in with the amount of pressure we put on kids to perform in the current educational context, and the inevitable stress and anxiety this causes them, makes for a situation where kids might very well experience a significantly lower quality of life than otherwise possible, and might significantly underperform owing to their relative inability to positively respond to the challenges they are faced with.

The introduction of mindfulness into schools allows the educational system to efficaciously extend the significant role it has taken on with the introduction of PSHE in the positive promotion of greater wellbeing, personal development and a higher quality of life, as well as the more traditional functions of the present system. This has the power to negate some of the disadvantages shared by kids coming from homes where their sense of wellbeing and their overall quality of life (rather than just what they are ‘doing’) are not valued. It therefore strikes me that mindfulness, or similar practices/techniques, might have an important role to play in the educational setting, and I would be really interested to hear other people’s opinion on this.