The mental health of children and young people is increasingly highlighted in educational policy agendas. The Covid 19 pandemic has added a tone of urgency to the expression of concerns about mental health, and schools are increasingly positioned as possible sites of impact, support and intervention. As a result, school-based mental health interventions are increasingly common. Many of these are focused at the level of the individual and draw on western knowledge frameworks. Such programmes tend to ignore the social, political and historical contexts of mental health and wellbeing, including the role of colonisation and how forms of exclusion at the intersection of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, racism, and disability coalesce to frame schooling experiences over time. This paper draws on postcolonial theory to consider the tensions between individualistic and social/ political approaches to mental health and wellbeing and reflects on recent curriculum policy moves. It engages an inquiry into mental health education curriculum policy in Aotearoa New Zealand, exploring the basis of new curriculum articulations and what these might offer, reflect, promise, and obscure.

This paper engages a critical and post-colonial policy analysis, drawing on Mundy et al's (2016) notion of policyscapes and post-colonial thinking to interrogate the construction of mental health in relation to schools, and understand the resulting policy expressions.

Mental health-related policyscapes and meta-discourses set up particular possibilities for thinking about mental health and wellbeing at the intersection of schools, mental health and youth. Schools are positioned in these in particular ways, and teachers and students are ascribed certain kinds of subject positions. The proliferation of individualised and Western notions of health and wellbeing flow through and are disrupted in policy in a range of ways. Mental health education policy at once reinscribes pathological western frameworks and also disrupts these in complex ways.

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