May is Mental Health Month. It’s a time when we are encouraged to talk more openly about anxiety, depression and overall social-emotional wellbeing. But if we’re serious about supporting student mental health, we need to look beyond individual coping strategies and ask a harder question: what is it about school that is contributing to this distress, especially for students with learning differences?

For many children, school is a place of curiosity and connection. For others, particularly students with dyslexia, ADHD, and other language-based learning differences, it can be a daily source of stress. Not because they lack ability, but because they are asked to learn in ways that don’t match how their brains work. Over time, this takes a toll.

Students with learning differences often expend far more mental energy than their peers just to keep up. Reading takes longer. Staying focused takes effort. Organising thoughts, getting them onto paper, processing instructions, all of it requires more. And when that effort isn’t recognised, or is misread as laziness or lack of motivation, students start to absorb a message: that they are falling short.

That internalisation is where mental health concerns often take root.

At the Bermuda Centre for Creative Learning, we see every day how closely learning and mental health are connected. Many students arrive with confidence already worn down by years of struggling in environments that were not built for how they learn. Our work often starts with something simple: rebuilding a sense of safety.

When instruction is clear, progress is visible, and students are taught how they learn, not just what to learn, something changes. Anxiety settles. Engagement returns. Students start to take risks again, not because learning suddenly became easy, but because it became accessible.

This is why BCCL has signed Bermuda’s Youth Mental Health Pledge. The pledge is a public commitment to placing student wellbeing at the heart of school life, not as an add-on, but as a shared responsibility.

For us, this means recognising that student’s wellbeing is shaped by daily experiences in classrooms: by whether students feel safe to ask questions, supported when they struggle, and known for more than their challenges.

It means working in partnership with students, families, and staff to build a community where social-emotional learning is the foundation for all other learning.

What’s often missed in conversations about student mental health is this: many struggles are not just about the child, but responses to the environment interacting with a child’s own mental health profile.

Schools do not cause anxiety or depression, but they can either ease or intensify an emotional load a student is already carrying.

When a child spends six hours a day in a setting where their strengths are overlooked and their challenges are repeatedly exposed, their nervous system remains on alert.

Learning can become associated with pressure, unpredictability, or fear rather than growth. Over time, that compounds into anxiety, avoidance, low mood, and behaviour that looks like disengagement, but is often something else.

Changing the educational environment does not ‘fix’ mental health and schools are not, and should not be, mental health services. But schools can reduce harm. They can remove some of the friction and create conditions where students feel more settled, more capable, more understood.

When students with learning differences are taught in ways that reflect how they learn, with clear instruction, flexible pacing, movement and strong relationships, the difference is noticeable. Not perfect, but real.

Students may still struggle, but they are less likely to experience failure as personal deficiency. Success becomes more predictable, feedback more constructive, and effort more clearly linked to growth. Confidence grows not because challenges disappear, but because students are met with tools rather than judgment.

This Mental Health Month, it’s worth widening the conversation beyond therapy offices and wellness programmes to include classrooms, curricula, and school structures.

Supporting student mental health means stepping back and asking whether our educational environments support a student’s social and emotional wellbeing. Because belonging, predictability and understanding are not extras. They’re part of what makes everything else work.

Students deserve environments that work with who they are, while recognising that some needs extend beyond the school day. And when we get that balance right, schools become part of the support, not part of the strain.

• Lindsey Sirju is cofounder and deputy head of school at BCCL