Mental Health and Social Emotional Learning Policy Brief

Primary Teacher Training Colleges (PTCs) play a key role in providing Professional Development Programs to teachers and addressing their needs. Strengthening PTCs tutors' capacity to provide a social emotional learning (SEL) and mental health promotion curriculum to teachers can be an efficient way to promote teacher and learner SEL. The LASER PULSE-funded project on Catalyzing Change in Education through a Transformative Learning Collaborative: Scaling-Up of a Social Emotional Learning Curriculum in Uganda has been working together with a diverse team of the NYU School of Medicine, Makerere University, Uganda Ministry of Education and Sports (MOE), Uganda Ministry of Health (MOH), and Primary Teacher College (Nakaseke) to promote teacher and learner SEL. ParentCorps and Teacher-Wellness programs are evidence-based interventions for promoting teachers' and children's mental health, with support evidence from Uganda. Training teachers on both programs not only improves learners' SEL/mental health outcomes but also improves teachers' teaching practice, classroom behavioral management, stress management, and teacher social emotional wellbeing. The Uganda Ministry of Education (MOE) is recommended to integrate and promote training teachers on ParentCorps and Teacher-Wellness programs. These evidence-based and cost-effective interventions for promoting teacher and child mental health have the potential to address mental health gaps for teachers and learners in Uganda. The MOE can apply an academic-mental health-policy-PTC partnership strategy to implement programs, which increases buy-in, improves PTC capacity to address and support learners' and teachers' mental health needs, and promotes scalability and sustainability of the programs. ParentCorps is a multi-component and school-based SEL/mental health intervention aimed at promoting safe, nurturing, and predictable environments at home and school to support children's SEL/mental health and development. The intervention has undergone a series of testing in Uganda over the past 10 years for promoting positive teacher and parenting practices and children's SEL and development. Preliminary results from the evaluation studies have demonstrated expected impacts on teachers and learners, with teachers who received the intervention showing better teaching practices, better teacher social emotional wellbeing, and better learners' social emotional outcomes compared to teachers who did not receive the interventions.