There is not a school in the land that isn’t currently concerned about students’ mental health. Not surprising, given that the latest NHS figures show that one in four 17 to 19-year-olds and almost one in five 7 to 16-year-olds have “a probable mental disorder” (Newlove-Delgado et al, 2022).
This isn’t trivial malaise. It reflects young people’s answers to questions focusing on things like “losing sleep over worry”, whether they feel they play “a useful part in things”, or if they think of themselves “as a worthless person”.
It is clearly not the job of teachers to provide treatment for mental health difficulties. A systematic review of the evidence by the Early Intervention Foundation (Clarke et al, 2021) found no evidence that interventions delivered by school staff are effective in addressing the needs of students with symptoms of depression and/or anxiety.
The review found that for this group, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) interventions delivered by external professionals, such as psychologists, provide the only convincing evidence of improving mental health outcomes.
The same review, however, highlights areas where school staff can be highly effective. They can promote wellbeing and prevent mental health difficulties through universal, systematic social and emotional learning (SEL) – through programmes that explicitly teach emotional knowledge and expression, emotional regulation, communication skills, relationship skills, conflict-resolution skills, and responsible decision-making.
A number of well-evidenced SEL programmes available in this country are listed in the EIF Guidebook (see further information).
Programmes like these would normally be the province of PSHE teachers, or sometimes form tutors. But is there anything that all teachers can do in their subject lessons to help students with their mental health?
This was what the EIF and the Anna Freud Centre set out to establish in a report and resource I co-authored – entitled the Classroom Wellbeing Toolkit. We looked at the elements of effective SEL programmes to see what might be transferrable to everyday teaching and learning.
SecEd Live: Jean Gross is among the presenters at the inaugural SecEd Live Teaching & Learning Conference. The event on June 16, 2023, features many of SecEd’s regular experts, all offering practical advice for improving teaching and learning practice in the classroom and across the school. Full details of the programme can be found at https://secedlive.com
Relationships
We knew that any strategies must not ask too much of stretched subject teachers’ time, so we framed suggestions in terms of what every teacher already does, every day – creating relationships with students, giving feedback on work and behaviour, and helping them deal with work that is difficult.
If we look first at relationships, longitudinal research shows that good teacher-student relationships can help children show resilience in the face of difficult life circumstances (Rutter, 2006), that low quality of relationships are a predictor of depression (Schwab & Rossmann, 2020), and that students who report good relationships with their teachers are more likely to seek help for mental health concerns (Halladay et al, 2020).
So, what can we do to promote strong, positive teacher-student relationships? In order of effort, we might use:
- The strategy of greeting students at the door individually with a quick chat, which has been shown to increase student engagement with learning (Cook et al, 2018).
- A “10% kinder” strategy, where students who are having a difficult time are highlighted to all staff, who then simply make a point of going out of their way to show interest and warmth whenever they see them.
- The automated parent communication tool in the school’s MIS to send home positive messages about something a student or group of students has done.
- The “two-by-ten” strategy, where a teacher targets a student they don’t have a good relationship with and spends a couple of minutes every day for 10 days having a conversation about an interest the student has.
- Making sure all students feel “seen” and known as individuals, perhaps by asking all the new year 7s to complete a personal profile (an example can be found in the toolkit – see further information).
Giving feedback
Research suggests that to build mental health we need to give students specific feedback that builds their self-efficacy (the belief that they can make a difference to their lives and learning through their own efforts).
This means highlighting what a student actually did to contribute to any success they have (“It looked like everyone was listening to your presentation – what do you think you did to make that happen?”), or any partial success (“Okay you’re not quite there yet but I noticed that you remembered to use the formula we learned yesterday”).
Similarly, when students manage to get through a difficult situation or a challenge, we can ask: “So what was it you did to get you through that?”
When they show effort we can ask them to identify exactly how: “It’s hard to get down to revision when the X-Box calls, what did you do to resist it?”
How we help students deal with work that is difficult
Another aspect of feedback is what we say when students are struggling or fail. What works here in promoting mental health is emphasising that failure is part of learning, and indeed often how we learn.
Some schools use the FAIL acronym: First Attempt In Learning. Other teachers will highlight for the whole class what can be learned from a “marvellous mistake” a student has made.
I met one teacher who, if a student got 100% on a class test, having consistently got 100% before, would say “I can see I’ve wasted your time”.
This kind of legitimising of mistakes is particularly helpful for the perfectionist, anxious girls who often go on to develop mental health difficulties.
Helping students manage everyday stress, low mood, and anxiety
In the toolkit, we used helping students cope with exam stress as another example of the way subject teachers can contribute to students’ mental health within their everyday work.
We suggest showing students the stress curve (see Nickerson, 2021) to help them understand that a little anxiety is actually helpful. Heart pounding? That’s preparing you for action. Breathing a bit faster? That’s getting more oxygen to your brain.
It is only when anxiety gets too much that performance is impaired, and students can learn simple relaxation strategies like five finger breathing (see Herman, 2021) to prevent themselves reaching this point.
Teachers who contributed to our report noted that students do not always understand that a certain degree of anxiety, or low mood, is normal.
One told us: “We’ve now got children who self-label, because they don’t fully understand what they’re feeling. They use words sometimes that are too strong. They kind of mislabel themselves and say ‘I suffer from anxieties’. Do you? Or are you just a little bit stressed today?”
So to some extent normalising human emotions is useful. It is a fine line, however, between normalising and being dismissive, and between normalising and failing to notice a student who really needs expert help. The secret lies in using active listening techniques to find out more:
- Acknowledging the feeling: “I can see you’re really upset.” “That sounds tough, I’m sorry.”
- Paraphrasing and reflecting back what the student has said: “So you’re finding the work tough at the moment. Could you tell me a bit more about that?”
- Summarising what they have said and asking them if you understood correctly: “So what you’re saying is that the amount of work is too much now, you’re feeling overwhelmed, and you’d like some help in deciding on priorities. Is there anything I’ve missed?”
- Establishing the next steps: “What do you need right now?” “Would it help to talk to…?”
How to find out more
There are many other ways in which subject teachers can promote mental health in their classrooms – building a climate of supportive peer relationships, for example, and live-modelling how to deal with frustration, navigate conflict, and handle mistakes.
In this article I’ve only been able to touch on a few key strategies. I will be sharing more at the SecEd Live event on June 16 – see below. I hope to see you there.
- Jean Gross CBE is a former psychologist and teacher, who led the development of the national Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) approach for schools. She co-authored the EEF’s 2019 Improving social and emotional learning in primary schools guidance and the EIF/Anna Freud Centre’s 2022 Classroom Wellbeing Toolkit. Follow her on Twitter @JeanGrossCBE, visit www.jean-gross.com and read her previous articles for SecEd via https://bit.ly/seced-gross
SecEd Live
Jean Gross is among the presenters at the inaugural SecEd Live Teaching & Learning Conference. The event on June 16, 2023, features many of SecEd’s regular experts, all offering practical advice for improving teaching and learning practice in the classroom and across the school. Full details of the programme can be found at https://secedlive.com
Further information & resources
- Anna Freud Centre & EIF: Classroom Wellbeing Toolkit: www.annafreud.org/schools-and-colleges/resources/classroom-wellbeing-toolkit/
- Anna Freud Centre & EIF: Pupil Personal Profile, Classroom Wellbeing Toolkit: https://bit.ly/3Ih1PUw
- Clarke et al: Adolescent mental health: A systematic review on the effectiveness of school-based interventions, Early Intervention Foundation, 2021: http://bit.ly/39KSxTd
- Cook et al: Positive greetings at the door: Evaluation of a low-cost, high-yield proactive classroom management strategy, Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions (20,3), 2018.
- EIF Guidebook: https://guidebook.eif.org.uk/
- Halladay et al: Teacher-student relationships and mental health help-seeking behaviors among elementary and secondary students, Journal of School Psychology (81), 2020.
- Herman: Five finger breathing, Mindful Making Self-Care Toolkit, 2021: http://bit.ly/3SfdPdu
- Newlove-Delgado et al: Mental health of children and young people in England 2022, NHS Digital, 2022: http://bit.ly/3AX0zTC
- Nickerson: Yerkes-Dodson Law, Simply Psychology, 2021: http://bit.ly/3lSQ5zN
- Rutter: Implications of resilience concepts for scientific understanding, Annals of the New York Academy of Science (1094), 2006.
- Schwab & Rossmann: Peer integration, teacher-student relationships and the associations with depressive symptoms in secondary school students with and without special needs, Educational Studies (46,3), 2020.