National School Mental Health Policy to bring mandatory counsellors to Telangana schools

The upcoming National School Mental Health Policy will introduce mandatory counsellor ratios, anti-bullying mechanisms and wellness protocols in schools across India. The policy aims to shift focus from crisis response to preventive mental healthcare and emotional well-being among students.

Hyderabad: Till recently, student mental health well-being meant intervention by the school management only when tragedy occurs in the form of a mental health breakdown, self-harm or an extreme academic failure.

In a couple of weeks, however, schools across Telangana and elsewhere have to stop treating student mental health as a knee-jerk response to mental health crisis by treating psychological well-being exactly like physical health, a matter that needs daily attention and regular prevention.

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Set to be officially launched by the union Ministry of Education by June 1, a comprehensive National School Mental Health Policy will introduce legally binding wellness protocols across all government, aided, and private schools for the upcoming academic year.

The development, following Supreme Court orders, is expected to trigger immediate and substantial change in all government and private schools across the country.

The mental health policy envisages moving away from advisories to actual implementation of measures to handle mental health crises among school children.

For all educational institutions, it is now legally mandatory to maintain a ratio of at least one counselor for 500 students i.e (1 is to 500 ratio).

The new mental health policy bars schools from dumping all guidance onto a single staff member. Schools must explicitly split the role into Socio-Emotional Counselors (wellness teachers tackling anxiety, identity, and trauma) and Career Counselors (handling stream selection and academic pathways).

Since it is a challenge for government schools to have independent counseling staff, the policy introduces an innovative “Hub and Spoke” resource-sharing model. Under this model, larger, resource-rich urban government high schools will act as ‘Wellness Hubs’, which will deploy roving certified counselors and share specialized mental health toolkits with smaller, low-resource neighborhoods, which will act like ‘spokes’ across rural and semi-urban districts.

The policy makes it mandatory for schools to clearly address cyberbullying, online harassment, and identity exposure. Schools must have anti-bullying SOPs, including clear, confidential mechanisms for students to report cyber-offenses without facing public shaming or academic retaliation.

Teachers must act as ‘First Responders’ and schools must conduct certified training sessions at least twice a year. Faculty will have to be trained to spot early, non-verbal indicators of acute stress, behavioral withdrawal, or self-harm risk, establishing direct, standardized referral pathways to external clinical networks or central helplines like Tele-MANAS.

• Mandatory 1:500 student-to-counselor ratio for high school classes

• Academic counselling and mental health counseling will be separate

• Mandatory bi-annual training to certify teaching and non-teaching staff as psychological first responders

• Create safe environment so that students can report online bullying

• Change teachers-parent meeting from marks scored to holistic development
• One major school to be a Wellness Hub, linked to smaller schools

• Early screening to identify emotional and mental health concerns