Grief Education in Schools Aotearoa (GESA)
“I would have liked my teacher to have taken me aside and acknowledged my father’s death, or my friends to have said something to me. But I don’t remember anyone saying much of anything.”
The case for grief education in schools
The quotes above and below are sentiments I heard so, so many times during the writing of the stories on this website and in my forthcoming book, Too Young.
Most of us who had a parent die when we were young have a “going back to school” story, about what it was like to step back into the classroom after such an enormous, life-shattering, terrible event. Sometimes, for the lucky few, it was handled well – the school was prepared, the teachers were compassionate, they acknowledged the death in a way that made the child feel safe, seen and heard.
These children knew that, if they chose, it was okay to talk about their loss and share what was going on for them in the times ahead.
Sometimes friends made a wonderful difference. They offered physical comfort – a hug, companionship, somewhere to be away from home – and were open and encouraging if their friend wanted to talk about their parent, their memories of them, and their emotions around their loss.
However, more often those I interviewed – all of whom had had a parent die when they were 18 or younger – had less than ideal experiences within the school system, and with their classmates. While those I interviewed are now adults, and their stories are decades old, I’m not confident children bereaved today would fare very much better. While schools focus on mental health education a lot more today (and, bravo), it’s still rare for death, grief and bereavement to be mentioned in specific and focused ways.
“At break time, a boy in my class started dancing around me singing, “Lisa’s mum’s died! Lisa’s mum’s died!” I remember that to this day, but he probably doesn’t... I felt so embarrassed to have the attention on me, and that’s how I often felt when I was younger. If I had to tell someone my mother had died, I felt like all their attention was suddenly on me, and I just wanted to be normal, to fit in, to not have to deal with the cloud of “Lisa’s mum’s died”. ”
I understand that. Talking about death is hard, especially to children. But if we start talking early about death and what it means, and how grief might make us feel and act, we build understanding – both about how it might be for us, and how it might be for others.
We build empathy and compassion. We give young people a set of skills they can use to understand what they are going through, or what their friend may be experiencing. So, when a child experiences a bereavement – and they almost certainly will – we have equipped them with knowledge, understanding and language they can use to ask for help for themselves and/or support their friend.
When a child is bereaved, some schools handle it well. That’s great, but it’s reactive. By also offering grief education in the classroom we are being proactive. We are building a vital capability within a new generation of New Zealanders before they are forced to draw on it.
That’s why I’m delighted to be part of the new group, Grief Education in Schools Aotearoa (GESA) made up of researchers, health professionals, academics and sector experts.
Our first action has been to make a submission to the review of the Health and Physical Education learning area. Interestingly, the topics of ‘Change, Loss and Grief’ were previously included in the Aotearoa New Zealand curriculum in 1999. However, by 2007 references to loss, bereavement and grief were removed.
“Back then I wish I had known it was okay to reach out, to share, to ask for help. The difficulty is that teenagers haven’t necessarily developed the ability to communicate what’s inside them.”
With more schools now opting to do more around mental health and wellbeing education, maybe there was deemed to be less of a need to delve into grief and bereavement. But we at GESA believe we must say the ‘D’ word. We must talk about ‘death’. We must name ‘bereavement’. We must describe ‘grief’. That’s what we say in our submission.
So we are starting a conversation calling for mandatory grief education to be taught in New Zealand’s schools. It took years and years of significant and sustained campaigning from the UK’s bereavement sector to have grief and loss education embedded into England’s (and only England’s) statutory Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSE) guidance, starting from September 2026.
We at GESA – and many others in New Zealand’s bereavement sector – believe we should require the same of schools here. And there’s a similar campaign under way in Australia.
As I say, this will definitely be an ongoing conversation. We hope the Ministry of Education will consider our submission positively, and we welcome conversations from anyone who believes that grief education is necessary. However, we must start talking – about death, about grief, and about bereaved children.
If you’d like to get in touch with moral or financial support for this (so far entirely voluntary) work, please email me. And keep checking back here for updates.