I strongly agree with a lot of points you made. In the end, both the education system and the wider political and economic context in which it operates give one – notably, a teenage one – many good reasons to feel anxious. Yes, breathing practice is not an answer to social disadvantage. Yes, the culture of self-care misteaches individuals to turn inwards in the face of systemic malfunctions. Yes, ‟children, primed to scan for emotional difficulties, begin to interpret ordinary discomfort as pathological”. And yes, neither schools are mental health facilities, nor teachers are qualified to provide mental health care.
Still, being somewhere in between a homeroom teacher and a school counselor, I believe that there is something schools could do about studentsʼ mental health, but it has less to do with safety (or ‟safetism”), and more to do with agency and attention. We can enforce smartphone bans and teach digital & sleep hygiene. We can bring shop class, or at least its elements, back to school. We can organize class trips in a way which would reconnect students to nature and make them wander together. We can moderate student self-governance in order to empower all kids, and not just those who already posses micropolitical skills. We can prioritise building a sense of community by means of collective actions and school traditions.
Arenʼt these ways too of creating spaces where ‟children feel secure, valued, and able to achieve”? Best wishes!
I couldn’t agree more with the spirit of what you say. The danger with any critique of wellbeing initiatives is that it can sound as if one is arguing for schools to do nothing at all beyond teach the curriculum. But of course, the opposite is true.
You’ve put your finger on what’s so often missing in the conversation: the difference between interventions that individualise distress and those that build connection, competence, and community. What you describe - banning smartphones to give attention back its value, teaching digital and sleep hygiene, reconnecting students with nature, embedding shared traditions and collective action - all of these foster the very conditions that support good mental health without turning schools into pseudo-clinics. They are not about making children safer in the hollow sense of bubble-wrapping them against life, but about helping them feel stronger and part of something.
In short, you’re absolutely right: these are ways of creating the security and value I spoke about, but grounded in agency, belonging, and real-world engagement rather than the empty optics of mindfulness posters and laminated affirmations. If only more schools focused on what you describe - the deep, slow work of building community - rather than the quick fixes that please inspectors and tick boxes.
Thanks, David! Would you be willing to share any book or podcast recommendations when it comes to building school cultures which foster agency, resilience and sense of community? By the way, just today I’ve got postal package with your first book inside. “What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology” is brilliant, so I have great expectations!
Interesting article. I'm an Education Mental Health Practitioner -- a newish children's mental health role where we're embedded in schools and tasked with a) providing targeted 1:1 CBT-informed work for anxiety and low mood b) doing whole-school awareness-raising and psychoeducation workshops. I love the first part of my role. Outcomes show that it really does work in most cases, although we have to be careful to make it age-appropriate (e.g. more behavioural tweaks than deep cognitive stuff) and kids and families value it.
I have lots of questions about the efficacy and potential iatrogenic harm of the second part. In particular, I don't want to be teaching primary-aged children about how to notice ordinary transient tricky feelings and label them as "anxiety" which, no matter how hard we try not to pathologise it, we have pathologised in the act of labelling. We are clinically trained NHS professionals, and more and more of us are being hired in rapidly expanding teams, so this isn't just a question of untrained school staff clumsily dealing with complex problems. It's about the overall idea that raising awareness and teaching kids to introspect more and harder will create good mental health outcomes when mounting evidence shows the opposite.
Do you know Adler's concept of 'Gemeinschaftsgefuhl'? Hard to translate but an idea I find interesting. I was wondering what you think of the idea of schools building community and working to create communal experiences that give children a sense of their place in it. When do we feel our most fulfilled? One answer might be when we lose ourselves in a crowd of people sharing a common purpose. Maybe this is nonsense but I remember a twitter post from someone back in the day showing these little Chinese schoolskids doing some crazy exercise thing all in unison. We might sneer but the poster pointed out the potential power of such experiences for young people and their absence in British schools.
What an interesting and thoughtful reflection. Yes, I’m familiar with Gemeinschaftsgefühl: often rendered as social interest or community feeling, though both fall short of capturing the richness of Adler’s idea. It’s that sense of connectedness, of belonging to a greater whole, of recognising that our well-being is tied to the well-being of others. I agree, it’s a compelling concept for schools.
You’re right to point out that communal experiences, where we lose ourselves in shared purpose, can be deeply fulfilling. There’s something primal about being part of a crowd united in intention. It can feel transcendent, as if the individual self dissolves and we become part of something larger. School assemblies, choirs, sports teams, even the quiet industry of a class absorbed in a shared task, these can all hint at that.
And I think you’ve put your finger on a tension in British schooling. We tend to mistrust overt displays of collective action, perhaps seeing them as faintly authoritarian, or as undermining individuality. So we often shy away from the very rituals and experiences that might foster Gemeinschaftsgefühl. The example of the Chinese schoolchildren is telling. Yes, we might sneer but maybe we do so because we’re uncomfortable with what it reveals about what’s missing in our own culture.
This isn’t to suggest we should import rote conformity. But I do think schools could do more to build positive communal identity. Not just through token events, but by creating regular, meaningful opportunities for students to experience that joy of shared purpose. Otherwise, we leave that yearning unfulfilled, or worse, we see it satisfied elsewhere in less healthy ways.
Not nonsense at all. A very worthwhile line of thought.
Thanks for the reply (and for your writing and podcast, which I am finding very engaging). I have thought about the communal experiences thing ever since that twitter post. It's probably hard to get right, given how sardonic many British kids become at quite a young age. I was a TA for a while at Sally Coates' school and she tried to get all the kids singing sometimes in assembly, which was shambolic and probably counter-productive. And like you say there is always the risk of some kind of imposed conformity, which can be cringeworthy at best. Cf. a video I once saw of Michaela pupils being made to sing Jerusalem on a school trip bus.
Some easy and valid points scored here. Mindfulness and accompanying breathing exercises are not a panacea. Nor, however, are they entirely 'snake oil'. With visualisation techniques they have been shown to aid 'high performance' under pressure, by lowering the heart rate and reducing the amount of cortisol, the stress hormone.
I strongly agree with a lot of points you made. In the end, both the education system and the wider political and economic context in which it operates give one – notably, a teenage one – many good reasons to feel anxious. Yes, breathing practice is not an answer to social disadvantage. Yes, the culture of self-care misteaches individuals to turn inwards in the face of systemic malfunctions. Yes, ‟children, primed to scan for emotional difficulties, begin to interpret ordinary discomfort as pathological”. And yes, neither schools are mental health facilities, nor teachers are qualified to provide mental health care.
Still, being somewhere in between a homeroom teacher and a school counselor, I believe that there is something schools could do about studentsʼ mental health, but it has less to do with safety (or ‟safetism”), and more to do with agency and attention. We can enforce smartphone bans and teach digital & sleep hygiene. We can bring shop class, or at least its elements, back to school. We can organize class trips in a way which would reconnect students to nature and make them wander together. We can moderate student self-governance in order to empower all kids, and not just those who already posses micropolitical skills. We can prioritise building a sense of community by means of collective actions and school traditions.
Arenʼt these ways too of creating spaces where ‟children feel secure, valued, and able to achieve”? Best wishes!
I couldn’t agree more with the spirit of what you say. The danger with any critique of wellbeing initiatives is that it can sound as if one is arguing for schools to do nothing at all beyond teach the curriculum. But of course, the opposite is true.
You’ve put your finger on what’s so often missing in the conversation: the difference between interventions that individualise distress and those that build connection, competence, and community. What you describe - banning smartphones to give attention back its value, teaching digital and sleep hygiene, reconnecting students with nature, embedding shared traditions and collective action - all of these foster the very conditions that support good mental health without turning schools into pseudo-clinics. They are not about making children safer in the hollow sense of bubble-wrapping them against life, but about helping them feel stronger and part of something.
In short, you’re absolutely right: these are ways of creating the security and value I spoke about, but grounded in agency, belonging, and real-world engagement rather than the empty optics of mindfulness posters and laminated affirmations. If only more schools focused on what you describe - the deep, slow work of building community - rather than the quick fixes that please inspectors and tick boxes.
Thanks, David! Would you be willing to share any book or podcast recommendations when it comes to building school cultures which foster agency, resilience and sense of community? By the way, just today I’ve got postal package with your first book inside. “What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology” is brilliant, so I have great expectations!
Ha. That was my fourth book :)
You might find my book Intelligent Accountability useful. It’s available as an audiobook if you like that sort of thing: https://amzn.to/3TUM5N2
Interesting article. I'm an Education Mental Health Practitioner -- a newish children's mental health role where we're embedded in schools and tasked with a) providing targeted 1:1 CBT-informed work for anxiety and low mood b) doing whole-school awareness-raising and psychoeducation workshops. I love the first part of my role. Outcomes show that it really does work in most cases, although we have to be careful to make it age-appropriate (e.g. more behavioural tweaks than deep cognitive stuff) and kids and families value it.
I have lots of questions about the efficacy and potential iatrogenic harm of the second part. In particular, I don't want to be teaching primary-aged children about how to notice ordinary transient tricky feelings and label them as "anxiety" which, no matter how hard we try not to pathologise it, we have pathologised in the act of labelling. We are clinically trained NHS professionals, and more and more of us are being hired in rapidly expanding teams, so this isn't just a question of untrained school staff clumsily dealing with complex problems. It's about the overall idea that raising awareness and teaching kids to introspect more and harder will create good mental health outcomes when mounting evidence shows the opposite.
Do you know Adler's concept of 'Gemeinschaftsgefuhl'? Hard to translate but an idea I find interesting. I was wondering what you think of the idea of schools building community and working to create communal experiences that give children a sense of their place in it. When do we feel our most fulfilled? One answer might be when we lose ourselves in a crowd of people sharing a common purpose. Maybe this is nonsense but I remember a twitter post from someone back in the day showing these little Chinese schoolskids doing some crazy exercise thing all in unison. We might sneer but the poster pointed out the potential power of such experiences for young people and their absence in British schools.
What an interesting and thoughtful reflection. Yes, I’m familiar with Gemeinschaftsgefühl: often rendered as social interest or community feeling, though both fall short of capturing the richness of Adler’s idea. It’s that sense of connectedness, of belonging to a greater whole, of recognising that our well-being is tied to the well-being of others. I agree, it’s a compelling concept for schools.
You’re right to point out that communal experiences, where we lose ourselves in shared purpose, can be deeply fulfilling. There’s something primal about being part of a crowd united in intention. It can feel transcendent, as if the individual self dissolves and we become part of something larger. School assemblies, choirs, sports teams, even the quiet industry of a class absorbed in a shared task, these can all hint at that.
And I think you’ve put your finger on a tension in British schooling. We tend to mistrust overt displays of collective action, perhaps seeing them as faintly authoritarian, or as undermining individuality. So we often shy away from the very rituals and experiences that might foster Gemeinschaftsgefühl. The example of the Chinese schoolchildren is telling. Yes, we might sneer but maybe we do so because we’re uncomfortable with what it reveals about what’s missing in our own culture.
This isn’t to suggest we should import rote conformity. But I do think schools could do more to build positive communal identity. Not just through token events, but by creating regular, meaningful opportunities for students to experience that joy of shared purpose. Otherwise, we leave that yearning unfulfilled, or worse, we see it satisfied elsewhere in less healthy ways.
Not nonsense at all. A very worthwhile line of thought.
Thanks for the reply (and for your writing and podcast, which I am finding very engaging). I have thought about the communal experiences thing ever since that twitter post. It's probably hard to get right, given how sardonic many British kids become at quite a young age. I was a TA for a while at Sally Coates' school and she tried to get all the kids singing sometimes in assembly, which was shambolic and probably counter-productive. And like you say there is always the risk of some kind of imposed conformity, which can be cringeworthy at best. Cf. a video I once saw of Michaela pupils being made to sing Jerusalem on a school trip bus.
Some easy and valid points scored here. Mindfulness and accompanying breathing exercises are not a panacea. Nor, however, are they entirely 'snake oil'. With visualisation techniques they have been shown to aid 'high performance' under pressure, by lowering the heart rate and reducing the amount of cortisol, the stress hormone.