Exploring Primary School Teachers’ Perspectives on the Mental Health Education for Primary School Children

The quality of mental health education for primary school students is closely related to teachers' ability to judge students' emotional changes, peer relationships, and family influences. This article, based on semi-structured interviews with 36 primary school teachers from six primary schools in Jinan City, uses the phenomenological qualitative research approach to analyze teacher role positioning, educational challenges, and improvement strategies. The participants included head teachers, subject teachers, PE and arts teachers, and teachers with mental health education experience, which helped present more diverse school-based perspectives. It is found that teachers in daily teaching undertake responsibilities such as emotion recognition, class adjustment, and home-school communication. However, problems such as unclear role boundaries, insufficient professional training, detached course activities, and weak support chains make it difficult for mental health education to be stably integrated into students' real lives. Primary school mental health education should further clarify the list of teachers' responsibilities, establish a hierarchical training and early identification process, integrate psychological support into classroom interactions, class management, and home-school communication, and rely on school-based psychological teachers, parent education, and external professional resources to form a continuous support network. These findings should be understood as context-specific qualitative insights that may inform school-based mental health education practice rather than as statistically generalizable conclusions.

Primary school teachers; Primary school students; Mental health education; Teacher perspective; Support system

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