Led by the Mental Health Foundation, Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 takes place from 12 – 18 May, a chance to raise awareness and reduce the stigma around mental health. This year’s theme is Community, reminding us of the importance of strong connections to provide a sense of belonging, safety, and support in hard times.
As we mark Mental Health Awareness Week, we are reminded of the silent burdens carried through school corridors, staff rooms, and playgrounds. In education settings across the UK, we see daily the emotional weight shouldered by students and staff alike, particularly in communities affected by the intersecting challenges of financial, physical, and emotional poverty.
Children and young people living in these circumstances often arrive in school carrying complex trauma, anxiety, and unmet emotional needs. Yet their distress may be hidden behind behaviour that is difficult to manage or masked entirely by the numbing allure of social media and other displacement activities. As a result, their needs are not always immediately visible or understood. What’s presented in the classroom may not reflect the true depth of what’s going on for them emotionally, which can make therapeutic or pastoral responses feel like guesswork for overstretched staff.
This is especially true for lower-paid members of the school workforce, teaching assistants, pastoral leads, lunchtime supervisors, who are often the first responders to emotional dysregulation and distress yet are expected to absorb and contain behaviours that can feel overwhelming and sometimes even unsafe. These staff play a critical role in supporting students’ mental health, often without sufficient support for their own.
This is where Creative Arts Therapy and reflective practice have a vital role to play. Our team at One Education offers therapy, supervision, and reflective spaces not only for students but also for the adults around them.
We understand that mental health support in schools must extend beyond the individual child, it must include the ecosystem that surrounds them.
Through drama, art, music, and play therapies, we work directly with young people to help them process difficult feelings in symbolic, embodied, and often non-verbal ways. These therapies offer a safe space for self-expression and meaning-making – which is particularly powerful for children who cannot always put their experiences into words.
Just as importantly, we offer clinical supervision and reflective practice groups for school staff. These are spaces where adults can explore the emotional impact of their work, develop resilience, and make sense of challenging dynamics. When a teaching assistant is supported to reflect on the fight-flight response they feel after being sworn at by a distressed child, or when a pastoral lead can safely voice the helplessness they feel in supporting a family in crisis, they are not only protecting their own mental health, they are better equipped to support others.
As mental health needs rise, schools cannot carry the load alone. Nor can the most vulnerable students be reached through curriculum tweaks or occasional assemblies on wellbeing. We must invest in the relational infrastructure of our schools: spaces for genuine connection, emotional containment, and creative exploration. That’s what Creative Arts Therapy offers, not a quick fix, but a steadying force in a world that often feels too much.
This Mental Health Awareness Week, let’s honour the complexity of what young people and school staff are living through, and commit to the deep, creative work that healing truly requires. Together, we can create a community in the truest sense of the word – being there for each other at the times we need it most.
If you have any questions, please reach out to our Creative Arts Therapies team to learn more about our therapeutic interventions and support.
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