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Wellbeing

Pupil mental health and wellbeing

Understand the board’s responsibilities for supporting mental health and pupil wellbeing and how to monitor this area.

Guidance
16/05/2024
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Governing boards have a statutory duty to promote the wellbeing of pupils, including mental health and emotional wellbeing. Mental health and wellbeing influences the physical and social health, attainment, and success of children and young people.

The Department for Education (DfE) and Public Health England (PHE) guidance outlines the school’s role in supporting and promoting mental health and wellbeing:

  1. Prevention — creating a safe and calm environment where mental health problems are less likely, improving the mental health and wellbeing of the whole school population, and equipping pupils and students to be resilient.
  2. Identification — recognising emerging issues as early and accurately as possible.
  3. Early support — helping pupils to access evidence informed early support and interventions.
  4. Access to specialist support — working effectively with external agencies to provide swift access or referrals to specialist support and treatment.

Our pupil mental health and wellbeing guidance, produced in collaboration with Place2Be, covers:

  • the board’s responsibilities for supporting mental health and pupil wellbeing
  • the board’s role in supporting a whole school approach to wellbeing
  • questions to ask to review and monitor implementation and impact

Pupil mental health and wellbeing guidance

PDF download

Tackling disadvantage

Mental health and wellbeing toolkit

NGA has developed a series of toolkits to help schools and trusts identify and tackle educational disadvantage. The series includes a toolkit focused on tackling mental health problems. We recommend you use this guidance in conjunction with the toolkit.

View the mental health toolkit
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Making pupil mental wellbeing a priority

In this podcast, Emma Knights, Steve Edmonds and Emma Balchin looked at pupil wellbeing, what do we mean by it and what does the current data tell us. What are the key elements for building a whole school culture that supports pupils and engages them directly?

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