Schools and wellbeing

Why schools matter

A child spends more waking hours at school than anywhere else except home. That is the simple reason schools matter for mental health: they are the one setting, outside the family, that reaches nearly every child, every day, for years. UNICEF’s situational analysis of school-based mental health and psychosocial support systems (September 2025) puts it directly — schools are uniquely positioned to promote mental health, prevent conditions, and build socio-emotional skills. WHO says the same thing from the other side: the protective environments for a child are the family, the school, and the wider community (fact sheet, 1 September 2025). School is one of the three, not a substitute for the other two.

What a whole-school approach looks like

UNESCO’s framing for mental health and psychosocial support in schools (updated 16 October 2026) is a whole-school approach, built around five essential pillars. This page does not enumerate the pillars as a checklist — the detail is UNESCO’s, and it is linked, not copied — but the shape of the idea is simple enough to state: support that runs through the whole school, so that policies, the curriculum, teacher training, support services and links with families all point the same way, rather than one lesson or one counsellor carrying the whole weight. A whole-school approach also means stigma is addressed across the school, not only in the children who struggle: the general stigma guide on this site explains why that matters, and the companion guide on living with a visible skin condition shows the same idea for skin.

What teachers can do

UNESCO, UNICEF and WHO publish a 10-action teacher guide, “Teaching with Care”, for teachers supporting learners’ mental health. Like the pillars, its actions are linked rather than listed here — this page is for parents and teachers to understand what school support looks like, not a training manual. The general shape is worth stating, because it is the opposite of what many people expect: the teacher’s role is not to diagnose or counsel, but to notice, to respond supportively, and to connect a child with the school’s support routes. WHO also publishes a mental-health training package for educators in its Eastern Mediterranean region, and the WHO–UNICEF Helping Adolescents Thrive (HAT) initiative supports the same work at programme level.

Support inside school

School-based mental-health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) programming was reported by 12 UNICEF country offices between 2022 and 2024 — a measure of how widely schools are now running this work, not of any single model. What the support looks like varies by country and by school: a named member of staff, a referral route to health services, peer support, and links with families. The companion guide on finding support for a child describes the official routes outside school; the point here is that school is often the first of those routes a family meets, and the one a child already trusts.

Bullying at school

Bullying is one of the risk factors WHO names for adolescent mental health — alongside adversity, violence, harsh parenting, severe socioeconomic problems, peer pressure, identity pressures, media influence and gender norms. At school it takes the forms children meet daily: exclusion, name-calling, physical bullying, and cyberbullying that follows them home on their phones. This page states the risk factor and goes no further with figures: the bullying figures in circulation were not verified against a WHO or UNICEF primary source in the research behind this page, and they are not quoted here. What is stated is the frame — bullying is a mental-health risk factor, not a rite of passage — and the response belongs to the whole school, not to the child alone.

Frequently asked questions