Help us equip young people with skills and attitudes that will benefit their lifelong wellbeing.
What are the practical skills that schools can teach to the next generation of schoolchildren to support their mental health and wellbeing? Our evidence-based mindfulness curricula provide lifelong skills and attitudes to children, young people, teachers and whole school communities to benefit their lifelong wellbeing.
Stories emerge daily about the crisis in mental health services and the need to promote wellbeing and resilience in our children. The challenges facing our young people are unprecedented. Pressures on our schools and their staff have never been greater. A mindfulness practice can help prevent issues from arising, as well as providing skills to deal with challenges when they do appear.
How can we address this?
What self-care skills can we give to our children to help them learn how to manage increasingly complex social pressures? What practical tools can we offer school leaders to face the national crisis in teacher recruitment and retention?
Mindfulness trains the mind to notice what is happening in the present moment rather than what has happened or might happen. We have all felt moments of panic or stress, worry or anger, or times when our thoughts seem to spiral out of control. Mindfulness trains us to notice these difficult mind-states and manage them more skilfully and kindly. It gives us a fundamental toolkit to safeguard our mental health and be able to thrive in any given situation. The benefits of mindfulness have been endorsed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and ‘mindfulness’ has become part of common parlance. But how can the children who most need it be taught what it is and how it can help them?
1 in 5 children and young people children and young people had a probable mental disorder in 2023 (National Centre for Social Research 2023)
- Anxiety disorders are estimated to affect 5-19% of all children and adolescents in the UK, and about 2-5% of children younger than 12.
- The number of school-age children being referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), has risen by 76% since 2019, escalating to over 1.4 million in 2022 NHS figures show.
The leading provider of mindfulness training in schools.
Our charity, Mindfulness in Schools Project, is the most established provider of mindfulness training for schools, delivering world-leading, evidence-based curricula for classroom-based mindfulness. Our materials are based on rigorous research in clinical psychology and neuroscience, written by teachers for teachers, and used successfully in a wide range of educational contexts.
Since 2009, we have established our reputation for providing the gold standard of mindfulness training and materials for the class room. We ensure that our schools can access the most professional, proven training programme which can be securely embedded so that young people truly benefit from what they are being taught.
We train teachers thoroughly and in depth to deliver our highly respected curricula. Our process ensures that teachers are mindfulness practitioners and experience the benefits themselves before they share their knowledge with pupils. This is the best way to ensure we make a lasting improvement to children’s lives. Once they have trained with us, teachers use our materials with class after class, generating value on their initial investment year after year. This means our programme is cost-effective and self-sustaining for schools. Our curricula have been translated into 13 languages and is used worldwide.
A lifelong toolkit for children and adults …
Mindfulness is a skill that can be learned and, like any skill, it needs practice.
At its most basic level, mindfulness helps train your attention to be more aware of what is actually happening, rather than worrying about what has happened or might happen. We all have the capacity to be more present, but mindfulness teaches us how to be much more like this more often, with all of the benefits that this brings.
Practising mindfulness helps you to understand your feelings, making you better able to cope and flourish amongst the many distractions and challenges of modern life. It can improve executive function, focus, memory, and helps manage stress and supports wellbeing, which is about resilience, flexibility, friendships and emotions.
We know that mindfulness is not a fix all, nor that it will be equally helpful to everyone. However, a great number of children, young people, and the adults caring for them have told us that the techniques learnt via our programmes have helped them and supported their mental health and emotional wellbeing, both at school and in their personal lives. In addition, research has proven the long-term benefits of mindfulness into adulthood, helping (young) people respond more constructively to challenging circumstances and stressful situations.
Our programme can provide life-changing benefits for teachers too, who can use mindfulness to better cope with stress and find a better balance in their lives and careers. Since 2009, over 11,000 people have trained with us and we estimate that over 1.1 million children.
But we need to do more.
- over 80% of teachers now report experiencing stress, anxiety and depression at work, due to factors such as increasing workload, rising and unrealistic expectations, with over 50% feeling ‘severely’ stressed. More than half consider leaving the profession as a result of work-related stress (NUT, 2013).
Support our work
Schools are increasingly struggling to send their teachers on our intensive training courses, due both to funding constraints and time pressures. Whole school communities are missing out on the far-reaching benefits of our mindfulness training.
Despite our curricula reaching over 1 million children and young people to date, we currently reach only a fraction in the UK and beyond, meaning the majority still enter adulthood without an awareness or experience of mindfulness, or the science behind their brain’s basic functioning, or a way of managing their stress during moments of difficulty. This includes vulnerable children in many under-represented communities.
Your support will help us to ensure that many more children and young people from across a wide range of locations and backgrounds are given the opportunity to discover and practice mindfulness skills to support their mental health and flourishing now and into the future.
An evaluation of our programme found that “mindfulness interventions can improve the mental, emotional, social and physical health and well-being of young people who take part. It was shown to reduce stress, anxiety, reactivity and bad behaviour, improve sleep and self-esteem, and bring about greater calmness and relaxation.” (Mental Health Foundation 2016).
Please help us continue this important work. Download our fundraising pack here.
Join our ‘Together for Wellbeing’ initiative and raise funds for MiSP or we welcome ANY donations or sponsorship you can provide. 
£795 will provide a bursary for one teacher with no previous mindfulness experience to train from scratch to deliver our existing mindfulness curricula within a school.
£1,750 will provide a bursary for ten teachers to attend an Introduction to Mindfulness for Adults course (.begin).
£1,200 will sponsor our Information Campaign enabling us to publish accurate information about mindfulness and myth-bust each month.
£75 will fund an expert-led Group Mentoring session to support trained teachers in their ongoing delivery of our curricula.
£75 will fund a School Sit Together session to bring mindfulness to new communities around the UK.
Alternatively, for £225 (£175 for state maintained UK schools) train with us and get your own introduction to mindfulness with our .begin course. This is a fantastic, instructor-led, live, internet-based, 8-week introduction to mindfulness course where you can learn the benefits of mindfulness yourself.
We would love to hear from you – please email us: support@mindfulnessinschools.org
Or to discuss sponsorship options or substantial donations in more detail, please email us: enquiries@mindfulnessinschools.org
Please support us! Go to our How To Support MiSP page.
Based In Wales?
To find out more about campaigning in Wales: