Healthy Minds Compact Nursery to Year 6
The psychological fitness curriculum for Early Years and Primary
Healthy Minds Compact is a developmental psychological fitness curriculum designed to help children build the understanding, skills and everyday habits that support them to regulate, recover and adapt through challenge, change and everyday life.
The curriculum develops progressively from Nursery to Year 6. Children begin by experiencing and noticing simple skills through play, relationships and everyday interactions. As they grow, they develop greater emotional awareness, stronger communication and thinking skills, a deeper understanding of their strengths, and increasing ability to make deliberate choices about how they respond.
Psychological fitness is taught as learning, not therapy. Children practise skills before they are urgently needed, so that over time those skills become more familiar and more available during everyday challenge.
The curriculum is organised into four developmental stages.
First Steps → Growing → Building → Strengthening
The developmental journey Across Healthy Minds Compact, the curriculum develops with the child.
Nursery — First Steps Experience and notice Children experience psychological fitness through relationships, play and everyday moments.
Reception & Year 1 — Growing Experience, name and recognise Children develop simple language for what they are experiencing and begin to recognise skills in themselves and others.
Years 2–4 — Building Understand, practise and choose Children begin to understand how emotions, thoughts, relationships, strengths and actions connect and develop a wider range of possible responses.
Years 5–6 — Strengthening Reflect, choose and apply Children develop greater flexibility, agency and ability to apply psychological fitness skills intentionally in different situations.
Browse the different stages.
Lessons
Explore the curriculum
Browse lessons in order, then open any lesson for its summary, learning outcomes, and supporting resources.
Healthy Minds Compact: First Steps: Kind Hands, Kind Words
Children learn that kindness is something we do. Recognising and practising kindness through everyday actions.
Healthy Minds Compact: First Steps: Name That Feeling
Children learn about emotions. Notice it. Name it. What or who might help?
Healthy Minds Compact: First Steps: Listen With Care
Kindness is something we do.
Healthy Minds Compact: First Steps: I Can Shine
Children learn about their indiviudal strengths
Healthy Minds Compact: First Steps: We All Shine
Children learn to notice strengths in each other.
HM Compact: Growing: Kind Hands. Kind Words
Discover how kindness shows up in the things we say and do.
HM Compact: Growing: Listen with care
Practise giving someone our attention and showing that we have heard them.
Healthy Minds Compact: Growing: Name That Feeling
Notice the clues our feelings give us and learn simple words for what might be happening inside.
Healthy Minds Compact: Growing: When I Shine
Discover that strengths are things we show through what we do.
Healthy Minds Compact: Growing: Things That Make Me Shine
Notice, share and celebrate the strengths we use in everyday life.
HM Compact: Building: Kindness in Action
Children explore kindness as something we do, rather than simply something we are.
Healthy Minds Compact: Building - Name That Feeling
Children build emotional vocabulary and learn to recognise emotions as useful signals. Children are not taught that particular body signals always mean one emotion, or that there is one correct strategy for a particular feeling. They learn to notice, stay curious and build a range of possibilities.
Healthy Minds Compact: Building - Active Listening
Children explore listening as an active relationship skill rather than simply remaining quiet while someone else speaks. The emphasis is on attention rather than compulsory eye contact. Children can show listening in different ways. Core idea: Listen to understand, not simply to wait for your turn to speak.
Healthy Minds Compact: Building - Choosing What We Notice
Children are introduced to optimistic and pessimistic thinking as different ways attention can be directed. Optimistic thinking is not presented as ignoring difficulty or pretending everything will be fine. Children first acknowledge what is hard and then practise looking more widely. They use four practical questions: What is hard here? What else is also true? What can I control? What could I try next? Core idea: We can practise widening our attention when our thinking becomes stuck.
Healthy Minds Compact: Building - Choosing Helpful Stories
Children begin to explore the relationship between an event and the interpretation their brain makes of it. Children are not being taught to replace uncomfortable thoughts with positive ones. They are learning to become more flexible thinkers. A simple structure supports the learning: What happened? → What is my brain telling me? → What else could be true? → What could I do next? Core idea: The first story our brain tells us is not always the only possible story.
Healthy Minds Compact: Building - Me at My Best
Children explore strengths as qualities that become visible through actions. Instead of teaching children that they are “the brave one”, “the kind one” or “the clever one”, adults help them notice evidence: “You showed bravery when you shared your idea even though you felt unsure.” Core idea:Strengths are things we can notice, use, practise and grow.
Healthy Minds Compact: Building - My Happy Helps
Children explore healthy positive emotion as one useful part of psychological fitness. The aim is not to remove difficult feelings. Children learn that small, healthy experiences of enjoyment, connection, movement or play can sometimes help them meet difficulty with a more ready mind and body. Core idea: Happiness can be a tool — not a rule.
Healthy Minds Compact: Building – Regulation Skills Toolkit
The Regulation Skills Toolkit sits alongside the seven lessons. It gives children opportunities to practise simple regulation techniques before they urgently need them. The central message is: Notice what is happening → Choose a strategy → Try it → Notice what happens Children learn that different situations may need different approaches and that there is no single technique that works for everyone, every time. The toolkit introduces three broad types of strategy. Body skills Distraction skills. Connection skills. The goal is not to teach children one “correct” way to regulate. It is to help them develop a growing bank of choices and the ability to use those choices thoughtfully.
About the organisation
Bounce Forward
Bounce Forward is a registered charity on a mission to transform how we think about mental health, shifting the narrative from deficit and crisis to strength, prevention, and psychological fitness. They create evidence-based programmes, curricula, and training that give young people, school staff, and the adults around children the knowledge, language, and daily habits to build genuine mental resilience. From whole-staff training to five-year school curricula, everything they do is practical, grounded in science, and designed to make a lasting difference not just in the moment, but across a lifetime.