children writing

Emotional health and wellbeing is crucial for school success

By James Noble 6 May 2025

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, published in December, gives us a clear sign of the new Government’s priorities on children in schools. It focused on social care, safeguarding, and some behind-the-scenes aspects of the school system like academy status and data sharing.

Much of this has been broadly welcomed by the charity sector, but the proposed measures on children’s wellbeing are underwhelming. For example, NPC is disappointed that there is no progress on establishing a national wellbeing measurement advocated by the #bewell coalition, of which we are part.

In its response to the bill, the Schools Wellbeing Partnership steering group, which The Centre for Emotional Health sits on, has called for a statutory duty to establish a whole-school approach to mental health and wellbeing. This idea is gaining traction, and since 2020, we have been working with The Centre for Emotional Health to test a whole-school approach in schools in Oxfordshire. Today, we are publishing our report on this work.

At the heart of The Centre for Emotional Health’s work is their model that defines emotional health as a set of skills and beliefs that ‘shape our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours’, and which is affected throughout our lives by our relationships and our experience of the relationships around us.

It is relevant to everyone, not just those with ‘problems’ or ‘at risk’. The Centre for Emotional Health believes that focussing on emotional health will have a range of positive effects, such as preventing mental ill health and creating nurturing, emotionally healthy cultures and environments.

Through the Oxfordshire project, the Centre for Emotional Health were funded to apply their thinking in partnerships with ‘whole schools’. Taking a long-term approach, these partnerships aimed to broaden and adapt the content of Centre for Emotional Health programmes to encompass training and supervision for all staff, as well as training to deliver programmes designed for the parent community.

In the schools that took part, we learned how a focus on emotional health:

  • Increased people’s self-awareness, helping them to understand and interpret how behaviours are influenced by feelings (in both themselves and others).
  • Provided a set of concepts, language, and approaches to support emotional health.
  • Increased knowledge and skills on emotional health.
  • Supported healthy self-beliefs such as feeling listened to, confidence, and agency.
  • Was thought by participants to have contributed to better relationships between staff, children and parents; leading to improved children’s behaviour, parental engagement, and staff retention.

The wider implication of these results is to support the arguments for schools to think holistically and long-term about emotional health, and for seeing it as a universal cultural issue. The report also includes recommendations on how schools can maintain emotionally healthy environments and cultures.

Finally, the report covers the challenges for charities like The Centre for Emotional Health working with schools. NPC wrote about this in 2016, highlighting the difficulty of engaging with schools that are already stretched. One of the key learning points from this report is the importance of charitable initiatives having the time and flexibility to build relationships with school staff and to adapt their offer to different school contexts.

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