Exam pupils at an English boarding school are to be given lessons in happiness.

Pupils aged 14 to 16 at Wellington College in Crowthorne, Berks, are to receive one lesson a week in well-being, from teachers coached in the new academic discipline of positive psychology. A -level students will also receive seminars in happiness.

Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington College, explained: "We have been focusing too much on academics and missing something far more important.

"To me, the most important job of any school is to turn out young men and women who are happy and secure - more important than the latest bulletin from the Department for Education about whatever."

The happiness classes will help children gain insights in how to manage relationships, physical and mental health, negative emotions and how to achieve one’s ambitions. It has been designed for pupils in academic years 10 and 11, who face the looming prospect of GCSE exams.

The lessons will be taught by the college’s RE staff, from the start of the next academic year. The content of the course has been conceived by Nick Baylis, a psychologist and co-director of the newly founded Well-being Institute at Cambridge University.

Dr Baylis, who wrote a weekly column on The Science of Happiness for The Times for two years under the title Dr Feelgood, explained that it was decided to start with 14-year-olds as they had left childhood behind and were learning how to cope with their own lives.

"By the age of 14, life is starting to look pretty interesting and frightening, exams are just around the corner and people are starting to ask what you are intending to do at university and as a career," he said.

"We will be asking youngsters to think about helpful forms of pleasure and happiness for themselves. Anyone can open a bottle of wine or pop an ecstasy tablet, but the kind of happiness that comes from too much food, booze, drugs or television quickly wears off and leaves you worse off than before. I want these youngsters to understand that we can create happiness, rather than consume it.

"Just because something feels nice doesn't mean it is good for you. Downloading porn as a 15-year-old schoolboy will not help you ask a girl our on a date or kiss a girl for the first time."

Dr Baylis, the author of Learning from Wonderful Lives, added that the lessons would also be dealing with the bad experiences in life. "I would like them to learn from the example of someone like Lance Armstrong (a US cyclist who overcame testicular cancer to win the Tour de France), who has taken their pain and anger and channelled all that emotional energy into something positive.

"I hope we are going to get onto some really personal territory. Where do you go with sexual feelings? What do you do if someone punches you on the sports field? What do you say when your father tells you he wants you to be the lawyer he never was, to fulfil his own thwarted ambition?"

Dr Seldon, a political commentator and a Christian, said that the lessons would complement rather than substitute religion.

"Celebrity, money and possessions are too often the touchstones for teenagers, and yet these are not where happiness lies," he said.

"Our children need to know that as societies become richer, they don’t become happier - a fact regularly shown by social science research.

"I have been very impressed that Cambridge University is taking happiness and positive psychology so seriously and that at Harvard University (in America), it is the most popular course, so clearly intelligent people see we have something to learn here.

"We are pleased that Wellington is to become a pilot school in a long-term study undertaken by Nick and his Cambridge team. I am more than happy for our pupils to be guinea pigs.

"I can imagine this taking off in British schools."

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