The Sir John Kirwan Foundation Mitey initiative has been at Mataura School for a year and a-half, led b0y its coach Belinda Brown.
Ms Brown said the programme, which up-skills teachers in mental health education, needed to be over a year to give overrun schools time to take it all in.
"The research shows ... schools are so busy at the moment, they’re just so action-packed, that if you just do 12 months, [it] isn’t always the same," she said.
In Mataura last week, she told The Ensign the primary school had a special place in her heart as she had attended the school as a child.
"We grew up over the fence," she said.
"... And used to jump over at lunch time."
After coaching 30 different schools in just over four years, last Wednesday was her final session with the organisation and it was "special" that it was in Mataura, she said.
All Mitey coaches were trained primary school teachers, and she was leaving to go back to the "coalface" of the classroom and teaching intermediate children in Limehills.
On her last day, she was helping to implement the programme in a class of year 1s, by showing them cartoon pictures of animals and getting the children to analyse their facial expressions.
"For them to be able to identify if someone’s frustrated, disappointed, annoyed at the age of 5, and not just sad, that’s pretty amazing," she said.
The Mataura teachers had embraced mental health education despite a busy classroom, which was impressive, she said.
Teachers were so "loaded" now with reading, writing and maths requirements, and "many" other changes to education, she said.
"But if children aren’t happy, and focused, and engaged, and ready to learn, those other things don’t work."
Mitey empowered teachers to give children the emotional literacy to not only recognise their own mental health but that of their classmates, she said.
The most important aspect of coaching she had noticed in her four years was teacher confidence.
Teachers best knew their students’ culture, context and what was going on at home, and therefore were the ideal candidates to teach mental health to children.
"It’s giving the teachers the support and confidence to then teach mental health education in the classroom," she said.
