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Why reflective practice is key to supporting pupils’ mental health

This is Place2Be’s Children’s Mental Health Week. This year’s theme is “know yourself, grow yourself”, with schools and families across the UK joining in to encourage children and young people to grow and develop by building self-awareness.
That’s what we aim to do every day in our partner schools here in Scotland: create a safe and creative space for children to open up about their emotions and any difficulties they are facing, so that mental health problems don’t grow with them.
However, for schools to be able to support children and young people to develop self-awareness and to understand and express their emotions, teachers need to be well supported, too. In short, we need well-regulated, emotionally-healthy teachers to create well-regulated, emotionally-healthy classrooms.
Helping pupils by supporting teachers
To do that, we take a whole-school approach, supporting teachers with safe, confidential and reflective spaces to talk to our clinician. The sessions are child-focused, aiming to help school staff to think about how they could support children’s emotional wellbeing as well as their own.
This type of service has never been more important. A 2023 EIS teaching union survey found that most teachers experienced stress at least occasionally and one in five experienced it all the time. Teachers and support staff also reported “high levels of stress and anxiety” as part of the Scottish government’s 2023 research on behaviour in schools.
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The consequences of not supporting teacher wellbeing for the wider education system are clear: teacher absence has reached the highest level since reporting began in 2010-11, while recent General Teaching Council for Scotland figures showed that 1,337 teachers had left the profession within the first five years of their career. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, education secretary Jenny Gilruth talked in the Scottish Parliament about the “persistent and stubborn challenges…in relation to teacher employment”.
So, how do we make sure that all educators have access to reflective practice and wellbeing support? One way we’ve been doing that has been through building the capacity of the next generation of Scotland’s teachers through our initial teacher education partnerships.
We now have embedded clinicians based at the universities of Edinburgh, Stirling and Glasgow, meaning we are available to a third of all student teachers in Scotland. As well as providing them with reflective practice sessions, our clinician delivers specialist lectures and they can access our foundation-level course on children’s mental health.
‘Pupils need to be able to trust you’
This, in turn, supports student teachers to bring their whole selves to the classroom, creating a positive environment for children and young people. One student teacher we’ve supported told us that “when you give space to a teacher to develop themselves mentally, it prepares them to teach more effectively as well, to venture into trying different models...pupils need to be able to trust you and feel safe in the environment you create in the classroom”.
This type of reflective practice can benefit all pupils, but it’s particularly crucial when we think about our collective responsibility to care-experienced children and young people. This week marks five years since The Promise was published, which said that reflective practice was “essential” for all practitioners working with children. With Promise Partnership funding we’ve recently concluded a project to deliver multi-disciplinary reflective groups that bring together education and social work, with 96 practitioners signing up.
In so many emotionally-taxing professions, including social work and counselling, reflective supervision is a requirement of the role. Yet, it remains an exception in education. We believe that to create school environments that encourage children to build self-awareness, all teachers should have access to spaces to reflect on their practice, helping them support their own wellbeing as well as their pupils.
Scotland is already a pioneer on reflective practice in teacher education - but we can do more, be bold and make sure that this type of support is available to every teacher at every stage of their career.
Fiona McFarlane is director for Scotland at mental health charity Place2Be, whose Children’s Mental Health Week 2025 runs from 3-9 February
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