Schools today are navigating a genuine mental health challenge among young people — and, increasingly, among the adults who teach and lead them. The Mental Health & Education strand at 21CLHK 2027 is designed to meet that challenge directly, moving beyond the broad language of “well-being” to engage with mental health as a distinct, clearly-defined area of practice.

This strand is deliberately precise about its scope. It is not a general well-being programme, nor a survey of pastoral care in the abstract. It is a focused, practitioner-led exploration of how schools understand, support, and respond to mental health — for students, for teachers, and for the wider staff community. It brings together keynote perspective, evidence and data, lived experience, and concrete case studies from schools that are doing this work well.

A keynote session will open the strand by setting the tone — offering an honest picture of the current state of young people’s mental health — before the programme offers curated panels and breakout sessions covering prevention, response, systems and data, and the mental health of the professionals who work in schools. The intent throughout is practical: participants should leave with ideas, frameworks, and connections they can put to use in their own settings.

The following themes illustrate the intended scope of the strand. This list is indicative rather than exhaustive, and we welcome proposals that extend or deepen it:

• Suicide awareness and prevention
• Responding to student suicide — the crisis-response dimension
• Data collection systems to identify and mitigate mental health issues (e.g. PASS and similar tools)
• Case studies from schools that have gone “phone-free” — with data and anecdote
• Research findings on the mental health benefits of outdoor education
• The impact of service learning on mental health
• Characteristics of effective social and emotional learning (SEL) programming
• Adult mental health — recognising the signs of burnout, and strategies for burnout prevention and recovery
• Case studies of how schools support teacher and staff mental health