Supporting Students with Their Mental Health and Well-Being During a Period of Uncertainty

Oct 23, 2026

Uploaded by Connor

Webinar transcript on supporting students’ mental health and emotional well-being during a time of uncertainty, with emphasis on how events such as COVID-19 have affected learners and their families. Speakers outline student thoughts, concerns, and anxieties, identify groups more vulnerable to mental ill-health, and share general strategies for ongoing support. The session also stresses that educators’ own mental health matters and that mental health equals physical health.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryHealthcare

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Webinar introduction and participation guidance

Recording, questions and chat

Student mental health during COVID-19 uncertainty

Developing awareness of impact

Families and vulnerability groups

Understanding mental health and emotional well-being

Teachers’ wellbeing and mental illness context

Conceptual model using a “bendy ruler” metaphor

Transcript-Mental health and wellbeing during a time of uncertainty Paul Ellis Head of Teaching & Learning Cambridge Assessment International Education Jo Morton-Brown Emotional Health Practitioner Flourish Paul Ellis: Supporting students with their mental health and well-being during a period of uncertainty. We are delighted so many of you can join us for this webinar from across the world. And we hope that you're going to enjoy and get a lot out of this session. My name is Paul Ellis. I'm Head of Teaching & Learning at Cambridge Assessment International Education. I think I've met many of you before in various times when I've been around the world presenting conferences and running workshops. So, I'm delighted to see some of you here again whom I know, and I know also that many of you will be wanting to get involved, ask questions, join the chat box, and really participate in a good way in this webinar, so I'd encourage you to do so. In a moment, I'm going to be handing over to our guest presenter, Jo Morton-Brown, who you can see on the screen there. Jo is an emotional health practitioner based in the UK. She's based about 80 or so miles away from here, 80 kilometres maybe. She's an accredited school counsellor, a family support worker, and provider of training to adults on mental health issues affecting children and young people. She has a YouTube channel called Flourish, and she'll tell you more about that later on. It's a channel which contains weekly videos aimed at 10 to 19-yearolds. Before I hand over to Jo, I just need to mention a few things. Firstly, the session is being recorded. The recording will be made available. It'll be made available on our website in the next few days, so if you want to listen again or if you'd like to encourage some of your friends or other people to listen too, then you're welcome to do so as well. So, we will make sure you get the link about that at some point too. Secondly, we'd like to encourage you to ask questions. If you look around on your screen now you should find somewhere a Q & A box. So, if you want to ask a question, ask in the Q & A box, please. Keep your questions brief, because otherwise they're quite hard to read quickly. Keep them to the point as well. The question should be about the topic that we're focusing on today. So, we're not going to answer any questions, for example, about future assessments at Cambridge international, how much content is going to be in exams. That's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about mental health and supporting students with their well-being. If you wish you can like the questions that you see and that will help us know which ones are the most popular. Thirdly, if you have a technical problem or want to ask or comment on something else, you can do so in the chat function. Many of you are already saying, "Hello from all over the world." Thank you for doing that. If you want to ask any other questions there as well, please do so. And my colleagues Salyza and Poonam will be reading what you write and responding as appropriate. And one more thing, we're not going to be issuing any certificates of participation to this webinar. So please don't ask about that, because it's not that sort of training. It's just for people to join in and listen, and hopefully learn a lot from what Jo will have to say to us. So, I'll reappear again in about 20 to 25 minutes time, when we reach the question and answer section, and until then, Jo is going to be looking after you. So, it's my pleasure now to introduce Jo. Hi, Jo. Jo Morton-Brown: Hi, everybody. Thank you, Paul, and it's a real pleasure to be here with you today. I love watching the comment box and seeing where you're from. So, please feel free to put where you're watching this from, because it's great to see and I hope that you're safe and well. Today, I would like us to talk about the mental health and the emotional well-being of our students. I wou

FAQs

How has COVID-19 been affecting students and their families according to the webinar?

The webinar focuses on how COVID-19 currently affects students and how it has already affected some learners, alongside the way these impacts extend to students’ families.

Which student groups are highlighted as more vulnerable to poor mental health?

The presenter identifies certain groups that are unfortunately more vulnerable to poor mental health and mental ill-health, then connects this to the need for supportive strategies.

Why does the webinar emphasize teachers’ own mental health?

It stresses that educators’ mental health is just as important as students’ and that supporting students can become difficult, making teachers’ wellbeing essential.

Oct 23, 2026

Uploaded by Connor