ABSTRACT
Children and young people spend a large amount of time in schools and the school represents an easy-access environment with direct day-to-day contact with children, young people and, often, their families. Schools not only establish the competencies for learning, but are an important setting for mental health promotion, through their role in helping to establish identity, interpersonal relationships and other transferable skills (Greenberg et al., 2003). This wider role is gradually being clearly recognised in mainstream education in the UK, where recent reviews of both primary education commissioned by the Government from independent experts (DCSF, 2008; University of Cambridge, 2009) and a new National Curriculum for secondary schools (QCA, 2008) strongly emphasise the need to help young people develop generic skills for learning and for life.
