What they forgot to teach us at school

A reflection from Belinda Elworthy, Gotcha4Life CEO

I learned the name of every bone and every physical muscle in the body.

But no one taught me how to strengthen my invisible emotional muscles.

We spend more than a decade at school. We learn how to do long division, write lab reports and analyse literature, but not how to say, "I’m struggling," or how to sit beside someone who is.

What I really needed to learn during my school years was how to calm my nervous system when I’m spiralling. How to tell the difference between a gut feeling and anxiety. And how to rebuild trust when someone I love has let me down.

These are the things other people tell me they wish they’d learnt at school:

How to emotionally adapt when things don’t go your way.

How to build real connection, and get it back when it fades.

How to ask for – and give – help.

In my view, there’s no more important subject to embed in our early years of learning – not just in the curriculum, but in the culture of our schools. In the way we structure conversations, classroom routines, playground dynamics and how we teach kids to care for themselves and each other.

The rising rates of mental ill health, and the emotional and economic cost to society, suggest we can’t afford not to.

As a parent, I know how important it is to model these skills at home. But we can’t expect families to carry this load alone, especially when most of us were never taught these skills ourselves, and many parents continue to struggle with their own mental fitness (a conversation for another day).

What we hear from teachers is pretty clear: we’re not there yet. With days packed full of literacy, numeracy, assembly prep and other timetable non-negotiables, there’s simply no room left. And even if there was, many teachers feel overwhelmed by the expectation that they should also be counsellors, carers and crisis responders.

That’s why the work we’re doing at Gotcha4Life Foundation matters. When Mental Fitness is embedded from kindy – and when teachers and parents are supported by an external coach and a simple, consistent framework – the impact can be immediate, and more importantly, lifelong.

If you learnt how to build emotional adaptability growing up, you were lucky.

If your kids are learning how to do this now, you’ve found a school that really gets it.

But until these skills, and the ability to truly connect and to ask for and receive help – are taught as intentionally as spelling or maths, in every single school, not just the progressive few, we’ve still got work to do.

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