In this post, Rupert Knight (PGCE tutor), Charlotte Allinson and Natalie Manning (PGCE Primary beginning teachers) reflect on a Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing (MHEWB) day which formed part of the University of Nottingham’s PGCE course.
Supporting teacher and pupil wellbeing in initial teacher education
Teachers’ wellbeing has become a high-profile part of the drive to improve retention in the profession. The annual Teacher Wellbeing Index from the charity Education Support reported in November 2025 that the overall wellbeing score for teachers was the lowest since the charity began recording in 2019. Simultaneously, there have been calls to develop mental health first aid skills among teachers in response to a prevalence of difficulties presented by pupils in the face of over-stretched services. It is no surprise, therefore, that both teacher and pupil wellbeing are mentioned explicitly in the ITTECF, the mandatory framework for pre-service and early career teacher education. At the University of Nottingham, one response has been to devote a dedicated day to this topic.
Timetabled at the end of the first half term of the school year and bringing together our primary and secondary phases, the MHEWB day takes place once the beginning teachers have completed several weeks of their school placement and have started to develop an understanding both of their role as a teacher and of the diverse range of pupils they will be working with.
The aim of the day for these beginning teachers is twofold:
- To provide an opportunity to reflect on their own strategies for managing their workload and well-being, and to develop further strategies and a greater awareness of support available
- To provide an opportunity to consider their role as a teacher in understanding and supporting the wellbeing of pupils they may work with
Our beginning teachers have a lecture from our Support and Wellbeing team to share strategies and resources and support available at the university. They then select two workshops to attend that are led by external providers. These workshops reflect the dual focus of the day. Some consider teachers’ own wellbeing, looking at issues such as the importance of sleep or how to manage perfectionism and procrastination. Others focus on their role as a teacher and supporting pupils, with workshops on climate anxiety and understanding behaviour to support young people. In some cases, workshops consider both teachers and pupils, looking, for example at how music or nature can be used to support wellbeing. In order to capture the experiences of beginning teachers themselves and the impact on their emerging understanding of these issues, we now turn to Charlotte and Natalie’s thoughts in light of this experience.
The place of wellbeing in primary schools
Natalie: We need to recognise how long we have the children for each day and therefore how much we can affect them and make a difference. We’ve got them for so long and if we can make a difference, we really should. Maybe primary school children have a harder time hiding their challenges than older pupils, so it’s easier to pick up on them and do something. As they get older, they get better at hiding, so we can catch things early and help them before a big problem has built up further down the road. Compared with my preconceptions, you get to know the children so much more than I thought you would. You see their problems but can also take them on yourself. Managing that knowledge is important and I’ve had to work out where the line is for me. I’m still working on drawing that line and seeing how other teachers handle it definitely helps. It’s instinctive to want to help but it’s also good to see another adult passing things on to others sometimes.
Charlotte: I noticed early on that we were talking at university about caring for the child’s holistic health: thinking of them as a person and not just a learner. I hadn’t realised just how interwoven the parts of a child’s wellbeing are until seeing it hands-on in a school. If we say that teaching is about knowing children individually, a crucial part of that is knowing their mental state and how that will inform how you interact with them. I’ve realised that I need to remember my place, or position. I hold on to the fact that I’m there to help them but I’m not their therapist or social worker. Navigating that is interesting. In school, what’s helped is really open communication with the class teacher and it’s been important to share out that responsibility by working as a team.
Rupert: What strikes me here is Natalie and Charlotte’s reference to finding a ‘line’ or a ‘place’. This is one of the many instances of exercising judgment that beginning teachers have to negotiate and, arguably, an increasingly prominent one for all teachers. Learning from cases and scenarios is one way into this. Lee Shulman, for example, has argued for the exploration of cases through the application of ‘strategic knowledge’ (or context-specific decision-making) as a powerful source of professional judgment. The importance of inter-professional communication also comes through strongly in these responses and part of the weekly meeting agenda for our beginning teachers and their school-based mentors is an explicit item on wellbeing.
Key insights and take away strategies from the MHEWB day
Natalie: The sessions I went to were quite hard-hitting. One was led by someone who works with permanently excluded children. She’d brought notes written by the pupils expressing what they’d say to teachers. Things like, ‘I just wanted someone to help me.’ It made me think about the reasons behind the behaviours. In the moment, when you’re teaching, it’s easy to forget because there’s so much going on, but each person has got a narrative. Another one was also about looking beyond the behaviour. There were a lot of terrifying statistics about pupils’ mental health. I knew there was a lot, but there’s so much more. I realised this does start in primary school, in the ages we’re working with. Before this course, I wouldn’t have thought that. I’d have guessed it starts coming in around puberty or teenage years. It was a real eye-opener. The big take away has been trying to notice more. Partly keeping an eye on children and keeping notes but also noticing how other people are handling it. I had an incident or two when a child has said something and I’ve felt out of my depth so, particularly this year, it’s taking opportunities to learn from other people. I’ve noticed things like some children in my class who seem very tired and I’m trying to work out why that might be.
Charlotte: For me, it was helpful to go through some of the red flags that might signify certain mental health conditions and what we might notice as teachers. It was interesting that some of the signs of anxiety might be similar to ADHD – for example fidgeting and not maintaining concentration, or being in and out of the classroom. It’s struck me how interwoven things can be and that’s why we can’t take on the role of a mental health professional. There was also a session on self-compassion and coping with the demands of school life. I hadn’t heard that much about zones of emotional regulation, but it helped me to learn more about how to rationalise and label your emotions in different zones. It related to children too: I thought about how to be a calming presence without being someone who absorbs all their emotions. That way, pupils can talk to you about their emotions, but you’ll stay grounded and won’t match those emotions. You can just affirm that it’s OK for them to feel like that. I feel better now about having that sort of conversation with a child and being steady and stable but also kind and approachable. There were also some self-management things to do in the moment like simply recognising it’s an emotion that you’re feeling and validating and allowing that. Self-management was also about having a boundary between work and home life and not being absorbed by the sometimes very sad things you might see at school. I’ve started to look out more for children who might be having a difficult time, but I think a really big thing is drawing that boundary and seeing how experienced teachers do that. One remaining question I have is about tone. I’ve realised that different tones suit different children in different emotional states and I wonder, next year, when I’m the class teacher, how I will navigate meeting the children and getting to know them. How long will it take to find the right tone and what is that process like? How do I ascertain their emotional responses to my tone without causing distress? I’m keen to research that and find out more before I qualify.
Rupert: Both Natalie and Charlotte refer here to ‘noticing’ new things in the classroom. Based on John Mason’s work on the Discipline of Noticing, this is something that we refer to in the first days of the PGCE course. As Mason says, experts are sensitised to notice things which novices overlook. It seems here that the MHEWB day has helped to develop this sensitivity in terms of looking out for what pupils’ outward behaviours and what they might signify.
Concluding comments
The persistent challenge of teacher retention is related in part to the necessity of supporting the ever more complex needs of children in our schools, as outlined recently by Haili Hughes in the context of SEND provision. Developing beginning teachers’ empathy, understanding and strategies for the full range of needs they may encounter has the potential to respond to both of these issues. Understanding and promoting mental health and emotional wellbeing have therefore become integral parts of our teacher education programmes. We hope that, by exposing beginning teachers to both challenging issues and actionable strategies as part of their PGCE learning journey, there will be benefits for both them and their future pupils.