12 Ways to Create a Mental Health Friendly Classroom

According to the World Health Organisation, mental health is ‘a state of well-being in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community’.

Schools are an ideal setting for supporting the mental health of young people. They play an important role in raising awareness, reducing stigma and supporting children and young people with mental health issues. By creating mental health friendly classrooms, we are able to support positive mental health and wellbeing before difficulties arrive and give the children and young people the skills to manage whatever life throws at them.

On World Mental Health Day Educational Psychotherapist, Alison Waterhouse, shares her tips to help you create a mental health friendly classroom and a safe space for pupils and students to learn and thrive.

1) Normalise the Topic of Mental Health. Incorporate the topic into everyday lessons and conversations. Show it is a strength and not a weakness. Building an atmosphere where mental health is regularly addressed in a matter-of-fact way makes it that much easier to discuss specific issues or problems when they arise. Since the pandemic schools have really tried to challenge the stigma around mental health and the feelings around mental illness. Sadly, many of the misperceptions of mental illness, and much of the prejudice and stigma surrounding it, often begin during school years. As we all know, the solution to address stigma is through education.  Accurate information is the most powerful tool you can provide a young person to counter the shame he/she may feel about having a mental illness, and to deal with the uninformed and negative ways others may characterize mental illness.

2) Know Your Students. Make sure you know their name or the name they prefer to use and something about them. Start the year with getting to know you activities then refresh your knowledge of children each term. Some schools even do this as a whole staff-training event to make sure that all staff know about children and the things they like, enjoy or the challenges they have had. This really sets a climate for relationships to be central to the ethos of the school.

3) Develop A Sense of Belonging Within the Classroom. Feeling that you belong is a very powerful human need. It enables you to feel seen and thought about accepted but most of all safe. It is so worth the time to build this into your practice at the start of each year and then to continue developing throughout the year.

4) Weave the Skills That Underpin Positive Mental Health Into Everyday Teaching. Teach social skills, emotional literacy, how our brain impacts on how we think and behave, restorative practice, listening skills and acceptance. Help children talk about change and how it makes them feel and put things in place to manage and build their resilience. These areas can easily be taught in small chunks and woven into a range of lessons. They can also be taught as specific lessons when needed and there are a range of books and lesson plans easily available to use.

5) Make Your Classroom a Safe Space to Learn. Make mistakes, ask questions and discuss topics, ensure that children are respectful and actively listen to others, that being kind is celebrated and supporting others noticed and commented on. Model how you would like children to be within your four walls and ‘notice’ when this happens. 

6) Recognise Emotions. It is useful to identify and teach the skills linked to how our emotions, thoughts, physical sensations and behaviours are all linked, and help children and young people develop healthy ways of coping. Encourage children and young people to talk about feelings and how they cope.  Work together to set up a space in the classroom for children to use to self-regulate and manage. This may contain a range of activities or things to support healthy regulation. It may also be linked to Wellbeing Champions in the classroom who can talk to other children or teach specific strategies. 

7) Keep It Calm. Being able to calm down is a skill that needs to be practised (with some children more than others!). Embedding periods of calm into your classroom through simple activities such as doodling, reading or colouring for short periods of time help children to relax. Once this is established you can develop other relaxation strategies and test them out. Not all people find the same things relaxing but what is important is that children start to listen to their bodies and notice how they feel and how to change things. For many traumatised children and young people mindfulness can be challenging, shutting their eyes and allowing thoughts to flow can be really stressful and may cause challenges for staff to manage. Explore a range of relaxations strategies with the children and young people and discuss how they experience them.

8) Be Playful and Have Fun. Play fosters creativity, collaboration and problem solving, all of which are important for good mental health. Make sure there is time in the timetable for children to play, whether it’s a maths game, a role play activity or a team building game to foster class relationships and add to that sense of belonging.

9) All Feelings Allowed but Not All Behaviour Accepted. Give feelings an appropriate outlet. Put boundaries in place around behaviours to keep everyone safe and develop strategies to help reinforce those boundaries. Ensure that all feel safe and that you will support the children to learn how to manage the big feelings they may experience. If at the beginning of the year you focus on creating a sense of belonging, it can be really easy to co-create a classroom charter or set of rules. This way you and the children and young people can explore your expectations of each other. When addressing undesirable behaviour, help both the child concerned and the other children in the class to understand that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of dealing with difficult emotions. Learning to identify these will come in time as the children are supported in identifying and accepting their feelings.

10) Move On From a Negative Experience. Sometimes it’s important to help children (and colleagues) to see past the latest disastrous playtime or bad lesson. Give children time to allow these emotions to change. Offer different strategies to help, these could be a person to talk to, time to self-regulate or problem solve. 

11) Help Children Understand Learning is Full of Emotions. Joy, delight, frustration, anger are all feelings that can be experienced. It may be that they didn’t understand column subtraction straight away, or they didn’t get the results they wanted in a test. By helping children put language around these physical sensations and then helping to develop strategies to manage and self-regulate or change state. A great way to support children and young people is to ensure that you explore Learning Zones, helping children to understand what happens when they step outside of their comfort zone can help the discussions needed around barriers to learning.

12) Learn From Fiction. Discuss the feelings and actions of the characters as you read books to your class. Is there a better way they could have reacted? What led up to the crisis point? Analysing the actions and reactions of characters in a number of stressful situations can support children in identifying how they themselves react in certain situations and how they might react more positively next time. It’s also important to share stories that directly encourage empathy, sympathy and kindness in order to foster these ways of being in children. By noticing these behaviour it lets the children and young people know that these are the behaviour you want to promote that you value.

Part of creating a mental health friendly classroom is acknowledging that we are all human. None of us is immune to life’s challenges, and we all need help sometimes. With these 12 suggestions your classroom will be mental health friendly in no time!

Blog written by Alison Waterhouse, an Educational Psychotherapist supporting schools through her Circles for Learning Project. The project works with schools to give children the skills that underpin positive foundations for mental health and wellbeing before mental health becomes a problem. We help schools catch children before they fall and give them the skills to fly.