Mental Health in Schools: Supporting Young People's Journey

India's schools, across K-12 education, have changed the conversation around mental health in schools significantly over the past decade. Mental health education is no longer treated as a single assembly or awareness week; pressure associated with board examinations, competitive academics and, more recently, a generation that grew up through pandemic disruption have pushed wellbeing into something schools are expected to plan for deliberately.

For a parent choosing a school today, the question is rarely whether wellbeing matters to the institution. Most say it does. The scale of the issue is not in dispute either: India's National Mental Health Survey found a prevalence of mental health issues among adolescents of 7.3%, with school-based research suggesting the figure runs considerably higher, at around 23%, once broader psychiatric symptoms are included. (Source: National Mental Health Survey of India, 2015–16.) The harder question for a parent is what a school's response to that actually looks like day to day and how to tell the difference between a genuine structure and a page on a website.

A pastoral system in schools that takes mental wellbeing seriously does not wait for a crisis to respond to one. Raising mental health awareness in schools is necessary, but it is not sufficient on its own; supporting student wellbeing has to be built into ordinary school life: form time, House groups, the relationships between staff and students that exist regardless of whether anything is wrong.

Three things tend to separate schools that do this well from schools that talk about it well:

• Students have a consistent adult they can approach without going through a formal process
• Staff are trained to notice early signs of distress, whether behavioural or academic, before they escalate
• Asking for help is treated as ordinary, not as something students learn to hide

Pastoral care in schools works best when support scales to what a student actually needs, rather than offering the same response to every concern. In practice this means three tiers: awareness, prevention and promotion at the base, accessible support in the middle and specialised care at the top.

Everyday belonging and prevention

This is the widest layer and the one that matters most day to day: House systems, assemblies and curriculum time that give students language for how they feel before something becomes serious. Together, these create the enabling environment within which the rest of the pastoral system operates. Most of a school's pastoral work should happen here, quietly and never make it into a report.

Accessible, informal support

Below the level of a full referral, many schools now build accessible interventions directly into the school day: brief, regular check-ins so a student does not need to be in crisis to get fifteen minutes with someone who knows them.

Specialised care

For a smaller number of students, this tier matters most, and it is where families should ask the most direct questions:

• Is there a named referral pathway, and who coordinates it?
• Does the school work with external specialists or hospital partners, and how quickly?
• What happens after a concern is first raised?
• How, and how often, are parents brought into that process?

Staff wellbeing in schools rarely makes it into a school's pastoral messaging, yet teachers are usually the first people to notice a change in a student, long before it reaches a counsellor or a parent.

A school that runs its staff on unsustainable workloads and thin support will eventually see that reflected in how well students are noticed and supported. Choosing to support mental health for educators, alongside educator capacity building and reasonable expectations of staff, is a pastoral care decision, even though it rarely gets described that way.

Treating exam results as the only measure of a school's success has an obvious cost: it teaches students to measure themselves the same way. Health and wellness deserve to sit alongside academic results as a genuine measure of how a school is performing, not as an afterthought to them. Schools that build resilience, self-awareness and a sense of purpose into the academic experience, not as a separate life-skills class but as part of how subjects are taught, tend to produce students better equipped for setbacks that have nothing to do with exams. The evidence for this is not anecdotal, and it reflects increased attention on social-emotional learning across the wider school community worldwide: a large-scale meta-analysis covering more than 575,000 students across 53 countries found that structured social and emotional learning produces measurable gains in academic, behavioural and emotional outcomes (Cipriano et al., 2023).

Mental wellbeing in schools for students is shaped by more than what happens inside the classroom. Pastoral care that stops at the school gate is incomplete. A student's wellbeing is shaped as much by what happens at home as by what happens in class, which means schools need more from parents than a termly update.

The stronger model is a working relationship: schools that communicate openly with families about what they are seeing, and equally ready to hear what a parent is seeing at home, tend to catch difficulties earlier than schools that treat communication as a one-way broadcast.

At Queen Elizabeth's School, Gurugram, pastoral care is structured around the same principle: belonging first, everyday support second, specialised care where it is genuinely needed.

Every student belongs to a QE House, a smaller community built around known adults, regular tutor check-ins and House assemblies so belonging does not depend on a student seeking out help formally. Personal Development Time gives every student dedicated time each week, delivered through tutor-led lessons, assemblies and one-to-one tutorials, built specifically around resilience, coping strategies and emotional growth and is designed to build essential emotional resilience over time. Student support brings together specialists in learning support, English as an Additional Language and pastoral care for students who need tailored strategies. The health centre operates on-site in partnership with a hospital, staffed by licensed medical professionals, providing day-to-day care, referral pathways where more specialised support is needed and workshops on emotional wellbeing for students as part of its wider health education role. QE Flourish, the school's co-curricular programme, extends wellbeing further into sport, creativity and service.

Beyond what any school says about itself, it is worth asking directly:

• Is this built into daily school life, or run as a separate initiative?
• What does the path from a first concern to specialised support actually look like?
• Are staff supported well enough to notice and respond, not just students?
• How, specifically, will you keep us informed if a concern arises?