Teachers naturally play a central role in their students’ lives, guiding their academic development and shaping the classroom environment, however as mental health issues among children and adolescents continue to rise, so too are expectations on teachers to venture into areas beyond their core responsibilities.
Dr Brian Moore is a senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Wollongong (UOW) whose research focuses largely on mental health and wellbeing.
His recent study was prompted by a comment he read in a report from the Australian Government Productivity Commission that spoke about a community expectation that teachers provide mental health services to students.
“It was suggesting that teachers can fulfil this sort of frontline mental health provider role without any training, and that’s quite a problematic place to be with mental health,” Moore says.
By speaking to teachers, parents, community members and mental health professionals, Moore has produced valuable preliminary data on where community expectations sit.
While some participants believed teachers should focus solely on supporting learning and creating safe, positive classrooms, others expected teachers to also identify when students may be struggling and to connect them with appropriate support.
He says schools are a really good place to conduct mental health work.
“And the reason for that is because basically schools provide you with access to the youth population in a way that you have nowhere else, and so they are a great setting to conduct mental health work, but the question is, who actually should be conducting that work?”
The report’s findings highlight the complexity of expectations placed on schools and teachers today.
While some participants believed teachers should focus solely on supporting learning and creating safe, positive classrooms, others expected teachers to also identify when students may be struggling and to connect them with appropriate support.
“What we basically saw was that if we’re just talking about parents and caregivers, about 55 per cent said probably or definitely teachers should be involved [in that mental health work], whereas there was about 30 per cent of the sample saying definitely or probably no, they shouldn’t.
“That was relatively consistent throughout the sample, except that you were getting a stronger position from teachers and mental health practitioners that probably they shouldn’t be engaging in that.”
Moore says what is even more interesting, is the response to the question ‘are teachers adequately trained to support students’ mental health?’
“No one in the sample thought that that was the case, so basically 53 per cent of the entire sample thought definitely teachers are not adequately trained, 40 per cent said probably not, and then a very small percentage said they’re unsure. It was very strong this idea that teachers aren’t adequately trained to do this.”
Moore says the variability in community expectations is not surprising and much of that is borne of potentially a lack of information about what a teacher’s role actually is and how we should define it in relation to mental health support.
“Something that’s really important to note, is that no government in Australia has actually ever defined what the role of the school teacher is in this space,” Moore shares.
“When we talk about what actually makes a person a professional, there are three aspects to what defines being a professional, and the first is the most obvious one, which is that you have vocational training [or competence] in this space. [The other two are integrity and accountability.]
“The training that we give to teachers doesn’t cover mental health training. That’s what you do in psychology or counselling, those sort of degrees, and so we’re creating this really problematic space where we’re expecting teachers to do it.”
Indeed, an interesting policy document in the UK describes teachers as ‘level zero’ mental health practitioners – which equates to people that have no training to conduct that role.
So does this mean that teachers need to be provided with mental health training or does more provision need to be made outside of the classroom for this sort of support?
“It’s a really good question, and my view is we need to actually have a national conversation about this in terms of creating an actual definition of what the role for teachers should be,” Moore says.
“If supporting mental health is expected, then educators should have access to ongoing, evidence-based training," Dr Moore says. “It’s about ensuring teachers can identify when students may be struggling and know how to connect them with help.”
He suggests the best case scenario is that more trained mental health practitioners are integrated into the school system.
“Now, whether that’s people employed by the school system, like in the Department of Education in New South Wales, who have trained psychologists that function as school counsellors, whether we use organisations like headspace and integrate external services into the school system, but that to me is an appropriate way to provide actually authentic and appropriate mental health services for our youth.”
The academic firmly believes teachers have a space in this role, but that the system is setting them up in a “really problematic way” at the moment.
“So that idea of teachers being frontline mental health practitioners, when they’re not trained to do it, teachers actually have a lot of capacity in their actual professional role, delivering education to students that has huge potential to deliver, and has huge potential to have, mental health benefits for students.
“So things like providing educational opportunities for students to succeed. That’s one of the best things that teachers can do around student mental health. It’s got nothing to do with teachers actually providing therapy to the students.”
In the same way, Moore explains, teachers have so many opportunities to promote positive relationships between themselves and their students and between students within their peer groups.
“The things that you’re naturally doing as part of your teaching role are going to promote positive mental health in students without badging teachers as mental health professionals and having these expectations of teachers of something that they’re just not.”
Moore says a big step is actually getting a conversation started about this “because if you wanted to be cynical about this piece of work, you could almost look at it as an exercise in teacher bashing and it’s absolutely not at all”.
“The point of this is actually to support teachers, basically position them in a way that they can actually do their job.
“And the thing about teachers is that they typically do want to support students – and so you get that sort of ‘how long is piece of string’ thing going on, where suddenly teachers, a lot of well-intentioned teachers, get themselves involved in situations that they don’t actually have the skills to cope with – and then you see well-intentioned harm being caused.”
Click here to view the study titled ‘Attitudes towards teachers supporting student mental health in rural contexts: a pilot study examining community perspectives’.
