ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the relationships between successful school adjustment and performance, mental health and social and emotional competence. It provides a strong rationale for why schools need to deliver an integrated model of teaching and learning that promotes young people’s mental health, wellbeing and academic progress. Notwithstanding what developmental cascade research tells us, there is an association for socio-economic status and school achievement as well as between socio-economic status and mental illness. Further establishing the intertwined nature of wellbeing, mental illness and school success, other research has specifically examined the social and emotional skills that children require in order to adapt to the routine and demands of school and succeed in learning. D. E. Jones, M. Greenberg and M. Crowley found that a kindergarten measure of social and emotional skills was highly predictive of young adult outcomes across education, employment, criminal activity, substance abuse and mental health.
