Primary school teachers’ experiences of their responsibility for pupils’ mental health and well-being

• Mental health and well-being: Being able to cope with everyday stress, learn, build relationships and feel good about oneself.

• Qualitative content analysis: A method that reads interview text, groups similar statements into codes, and sorts them into themes (categories).

• Semi-structured interviews: Interviews that follow a guide of main questions but allow follow-up questions.

• Internalizing difficulties: Problems that stay “inside” the child, such as withdrawal, sadness or anxiety, rather than showing as outward misbehavior.

• Gatekeeper: Someone positioned to notice a problem early and connect the person with further help, without treating it themselves.

• Whole-school approach: Mental health promotion built into teaching, school culture, leadership and support services, not left to outside services alone.

• Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner): A theory that development is shaped by nested layers of environment. Key layers here are the microsystem (classroom), mesosystem (school–home links), exosystem (policies and resources), macrosystem (societal values) and chronosystem (change over time).

• Role strain: Stress from expectations that exceed one’s time, mandate or resources.

• Emotional labor: The effort of continuously reading, responding to and managing others’ emotions at work.

• Guardians: Parents or other adults legally responsible for the child.

• Student welfare / pupil care team: A school team (e.g., counsellor, psychologist, nurse, special needs teacher) that supports pupils’ well-being.

• Pupils: Primary school children (in Finland, grades 1–6, ages 7–13).

The study aimed to examine how primary school teachers experience their responsibility for pupils’ well-being and mental health. It had four guiding questions:

1. What responsibility do primary school teachers feel they have regarding pupils’ mental health?

2. Which signs and symptoms of pupils’ mental health problems do they perceive?

3. What factors affect their ability to become involved in pupils’ well-being and bullying?

4. What are their views on how their work is structured in relation to their competence and ability to respond to pupils’ mental health problems and bullying?

Background and gap: Young people, including those in the Nordic countries, report rising anxiety, depression and sleep problems. Schools and teachers are expected to be frontline actors, yet little research examines how primary teachers interpret this responsibility in everyday practice.

Method in brief: The study took an interpretivist, qualitative approach. Researchers conducted semi-structured video interviews (30–60 minutes, April–June 2024) with six qualified Finnish primary school teachers (three men, three women). Experience ranged from 1 year to over 30 years, and teachers came from six schools in two municipalities. Data were analyzed with qualitative content analysis. Participation was voluntary with informed consent and municipal research permits. The study did not need formal ethics committee review under Finnish guidelines.

The analysis produced four main categories and 14 subcategories.

1. Emotionally safe and supportive spaces

• Teachers saw creating an open, calm and secure classroom as a key responsibility. Routine class discussions, consistent behavior and clear boundaries build trust and lower the “threshold” for pupils to approach them.

• They stressed helping pupils name and manage emotions, especially younger children with limited emotional vocabulary. They also stressed that all feelings are acceptable.

• Building supportive relationships before problems arise (everyday conversations, listening, giving time) was seen as inherent to the role, and is applicable to all pupils, not only those experiencing difficulties.

• Access to school counsellors and other adults bound by confidentiality was valued.

2. Recognizing pupils’ mental health problems

• Recognizing signs was considered part of the professional role. Signs mentioned included social withdrawal, being very quiet, isolation or loneliness, sadness, crying, restlessness, aggression, outbursts, a strong need for affirmation, low self-confidence, concentration difficulties, falling grades and increasing absences.

• Bullying (including via social media and group chats) was seen as an important indicator of difficulty. Teachers also noted that those who bully may be struggling too.

• Younger pupils tended to show problems through restlessness, aggression or crying, while older pupils tended to withdraw.

• Quiet, withdrawn pupils were hardest to identify and support because they rarely ask for help.

3. Role strain and professional expectations

• Workload, large classes and a hectic school day limited individual attention. Co-teaching and peer support helped.

• Curricular flexibility (e.g., pausing lessons when class well-being is low) was valued.

• Teachers felt unclear about where their responsibility ends. They saw their role as noticing concerns, informing guardians and referring pupils, whereas assessment and treatment belong to specialized professionals (“we are still educators, we are not psychologists”). Referral criteria were sometimes unclear.

4. Whole-school environment and systemic support

• Preventive work against bullying (e.g., the KiVa program, positive psychology, varied groupings) was seen as the most important task. Teachers lacked good models for social media bullying.

• Participants asked for clearer guidelines. Some were dissatisfied with anti-bullying software and paperwork, while absence-monitoring systems were seen as clear and useful.

• Collaboration with guardians (early, low-threshold, diplomatic contact), colleagues, principals and multi-professional teams was considered essential. Guardians were seen as holding primary responsibility for the child, and negative experiences with them could make later contact harder.

• Teachers’ knowledge of mental health was seen as a resource but not always enough to apply in class. Training was plentiful but often “prioritized away” because of workload. Societal events (e.g., COVID-19, school shootings) also shaped pupils’ concerns and needed open discussion.

Interpretation. The authors frame teachers as “everyday mental health gatekeepers”. Their closeness to pupils lets them notice changes, start conversations, give initial support and link pupils with other help. Responsibility is experienced as an ongoing negotiation between moral obligation, pedagogical work and institutional limits, not as a clearly defined duty. Using Ecological Systems Theory, they argue it is enacted in the classroom (microsystem) but enabled or constrained by home–school links, resources and policies, and by societal expectations and change over time.

Key tensions identified:

• Relational closeness is both a resource and a burden. It enables early identification but expands teachers’ emotional labor.

• A boundary problem. Practices that are good teaching for everyone also function as mental health promotion, so it is hard to say where teaching ends and mental health responsibility begins.

• Structural gap. Teachers are expected to give responsive, individual support while facing workload and time limits. The authors warn this risks “downward transfer” of responsibility to classrooms and individualizing a systemic issue, so that success or failure gets attributed to individual teachers.

• Collaboration is not automatically helpful. It supports teachers and spreads responsibility, but unclear roles or fragmented communication can add work and uncertainty.

• Signs are not fixed indicators. Teachers should read changes in behavior in context (age, development, post-pandemic conditions) and avoid mistaking normal emotional changes for mental health problems, with professional humility about their non-therapeutic role.

• Role clarity is a prerequisite, not just a stress reducer. Clear boundaries let teachers stay engaged in early identification while more complex needs go to professionals.

Conclusions and recommendations:

• Responsibility for pupils’ mental health should be understood as shared across the school ecosystem. Teachers hold a central but bounded role: recognizing concerns, giving relational and preventive support, and facilitating access to further help.

• Sustainable school-based mental health promotion needs more than knowledgeable, caring teachers. It also needs coherent collaboration, clear responsibilities, adequate resources and organizational structures that support rather than individualize responsibility.

• Bullying prevention should be treated as a whole-school task involving pupils, teachers, guardians, school leadership and student welfare services.

• Future research should explore practical tools and organizational approaches that strengthen teachers’ capacity to support pupils’ mental health while keeping working conditions sustainable.

Strengths and limitations. Strengths include varied teaching experience and gender and rich interview data, with later interviews mostly confirming earlier patterns. The main limitation is the very small sample (six teachers in one country). The findings give an in-depth account of these experiences and are not statistically representative or broadly generalizable to all primary teachers.