Mental Health Literacy is important to teach as part of a comprehensive Elementary/Primary School health education curricula

 

Including mental health education into the broader framework of health literacy development through curriculum in primary/elementary schools is essential.

When we think about health literacy in schools, traditional topics like nutrition, physical exercise, and dental hygiene often dominate the curriculum. However, health literacy is incomplete without treating mental wellbeing with the exact same weight as physical health. Mental health education provides young people with the practical knowledge, skills and understanding that mental ill-health carries a high lifetime pervasiveness. Begining early in the curriculum, mental health education establishes mental health maintenance as a ‘standard component’ of one’s overall health literacy and ability to maintain wellbeing.

With research showing that roughly half of all adult mental health disorders begin to emerge before the age of 14, the primary/elementary school years represent a critical window for intervention (Giles-Kaye et al., 2022). Integrating Mental Health Literacy (MHL) into childhood education can no longer continued to be thought of as an "intervention", it is a core component of health education curriculum and a positive health and wellbeing necessity.

What is Mental Health Literacy in Primary School Education?

Originally defined by health researchers, mental health literacy involves understanding how to obtain and maintain positive mental health, shaking off the stigma associated with mental health and emotions, and knowing when and how to seek help (Amado-Rodríguez et al., 2022).

For primary school teachers, this does not mean teachers diagnosing complex conditions. Instead, through the curriculum teachers building age-appropriate emotional vocabulary, opportunities for students to be learning self-regulation strategies, and normalising the idea that minds, like bodies, experiencing emotions is part of being human, but sometimes we need care and support inmanaging our feelings and emotions, through the teaching of mental health education. When children learn  social-emotional skills early, it can act for many as a protective buffer, reducing long-term issues with anxiety, behavioural difficulties, and social isolation (Slee et al., 2025).

The Dilemma

While the benefits of early MHL are clear, execution has historically hit a roadblock in schools: teacher capacity. While many primary educators find themselves on the front lines of childhood psychological development, reviews reveal that many lack the formal training and confidence to navigate emerging mental health difficulties of the children they teach (Bowyer et al., 2023).

Without specialised, structured programs, teachers may be left trying to handle internalising or externalising student behaviours with standard disciplinary measures rather than proactive care. To bridge this gap, school-based program-based interventions are often called upon. However, in most HPE/PHE curriculum frameworks, teaching mental health education is a core deliverable.

In the Australian Curriculum: HPE  mental health education is primarily housed within the Personal, Social, and Community Health strand, though it directly informs the movement strand through interpersonal dynamics associates with movement and physical activity contexts. In the AC:HPE mental health eudcation is explicitly targeted through two key focus areas across Prep/Foundation to Year 10:

• Mental Health and Wellbeing (Focus Area): Explicitly teaches health literacy regarding mental health, help-seeking strategies, and destigmatisation.
• Relationships and Sexuality (Focus Area): Addresses the emotional and psychological aspects of positive and respectful relationships, consent, and identity.

SHAPE America's National Physical Education Standards and National Health Education Standards (NHES) provide a guide to curriculum based mental health education:

Standard 1 (Essential Concepts): Comprehend concepts related to health promotion and disease prevention (includes identifying indicators of mental and emotional health).

Standard 4 (Interpersonal Communication): Demonstrate the ability to use interpersonal communication skills to enhance health and avoid or reduce health risks (crucial for conflict resolution and emotional expression).

Standard 5 (Decision-making) & Standard 6 (Goal setting): Teaching students how to make choices that protect their psychological well-being and manage stress.

Standard 7 (Self-Management): Demonstrate the ability to practice health-enhancing behaviours and avoid or reduce health risks. This is where stress management, emotional regulation, and coping mechanisms are explicitly taught and assessed.

In the International Baccalaureate Program mental health education is embedded through the following structural components:

Key Concepts (Change, Communication, Relationships): Units are framed around these concepts. For example, a unit exploring Relationships might look at how team dynamics affect individual self-esteem and anxiety.

Global Contexts: Mental health is frequently explored through the lens of Identities and Relationships (exploring mindsets, mental health, and resilience) or Orientation in Space and Time (looking at turning points and human development).

Objective C (Reflecting on and Improving Performance): Students do not just reflect on their physical skills; they are assessed on their ability to analyse interpersonal dynamics, demonstrate goals, and develop strategies to improve emotional well-being during physical activity.

Approaches to Learning (ATL) Skills: Across all IB subjects, HPE/PHE teachers are responsible for teaching Affective Skills under the self-management category. This includes explicitly teaching resilience, mindfulness, and emotional management to manage exam or performance stress.

Research highlights a distinct tension: educators are highly motivated to support student well-being, yet they consistently face structural and psychological barriers that make them hesitant to deliver explicit mental health education (e.g., Farrell et al., 2022; Giles-Kaye et al., 2022; Luk, 2023). To circumvent these barriers, educators are actively looking for high-quality, evidence-based structured curricula for very specific reasons: Mitigating a confidence deficit in content knowledge in this area of health education; confidence that the curriculum material is psychologically safe, developmentally appropriate, and built to avoid harmful triggers; in highly crowded primary school curriculum where PE and HE time is often much less than other subject areas,  “plug in and use” resources remove the instructional and planning cognitive load and preparation time involved in drafting lessons from scratch

Spotlight on "Big Talks for Little People" [https://bigtalkslittlepeople.com/]

One example of a program addressing this space is Big Talks for Little People, a classroom-based mental health and well-being curriculum tailored specifically for primary school cohorts (Slee et al., 2025). Operating under the guiding philosophy that "you are never too young to talk about mental health," the program utilises highly engaging, relatable multimedia tools like digital animations and structured Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) activities to kickstart meaningful conversations.

A peer-reviewed pilot evaluation published in the Health Promotion Journal of Australia highlighted the impact of the Big Talks for Little People curriculum (Slee et al., 2025). Following the completion of the program, primary students self-reported significant improvements in:

• Experiencing positive emotional states
• Recognising and constructively expressing complex emotions
• Measurable reductions in everyday anxiety levels

Crucially, the program addresses the teacher confidence gap by embedding an asynchronous online professional development module for educators before delivery. This equips teachers with the vocabulary and curriculum mapping required to safely steer potentially vulnerable topics like bullying prevention, emotional regulation, and trauma-informed interactions (Slee et al., 2025).

The Way Forward

Reframing mental health education as a foundational arm of overall health literacy aims to set young learners up for a healthier life trajectory. By bringing structured initiatives like Big Talks for Little People into primary school classrooms, we transition from reactive management to being proactive through quality health education for the development of young people’s emotional resilience.

Thanks for stopping by and reading this post. If you would like to connect with me about a project to do with this blog or any of the other ideas that I have blogged about, you can contact me by the email link available here 

Associated Blogs

Organised sport and children's mental health here

References

Amado-Rodríguez, I. D., Casañas, R., Mas-Expósito, L., Castellví, P., Roldan-Merino, J. F., Casas, I., Lalucat-Jo, L., & Fernández-San Martín, M. I. (2022). Effectiveness of Mental Health Literacy Programs in Primary and Secondary Schools: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis. Children, 9(4), 480.

Bowyer, M., Fein, E. C., & Krishnamoorthy, G. (2023). Teacher Mental Health Literacy and Child Development in Australian Primary Schools: A Program Evaluation. Education Sciences, 13(4), 329.

O'Farrell, P., Wilson, C., & Shiel, G. (2023). Teachers' perceptions of the barriers to assessment of mental health in schools with implications for educational policy: A systematic review. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(1), 262-282.

Giles-Kaye, A., Quach, J., Oberklaid, F., O’Connor, M., Darling, S., Dawson, G., & Connolly, A. S. (2022). Supporting children’s mental health in primary schools: a qualitative exploration of educator perspectives. The Australian Educational Researcher, 50, 1281-1301.

Luk, K. (2023). Increasing teachers' capacity to identify and support children exhibiting mental health problems in mainstream primary school classrooms. Education Research and Perspectives, 50, 208-251.

Slee, P., Pill, S., & Agnew, D. (2025). Big Talks for Little People: A Pilot Study of a Classroom Based Mental Health Program. Health Promotion Journal of Australia, 36.