Thought Leadership

The JC PandA mindfulness programme delivers significant stress-reduction results not only for students but also for teachers and parents. 

Among the many studies of Hong Kong society, one aspect is notable: the city’s students suffer from high levels of stress. It’s not a uniquely Hong Kong problem – much of East Asia share the same intense focus on achieving high marks as a path to a better life.

Professor Shui Fong Lam of the Faculty of Social Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) attributes this to the region’s shared values.

“In Confucian culture, academic achievement is highly valued, so that the education system becomes a pressure cooker,” she explains.

But this focus can inflict misery on those students who must strive from a very early age to master difficult curricula, as well as on their teachers and parents. For some, the price can be too hard to bear. Professor Lam notes that Hong Kong holds the sad record for the youngest suicide – a seven-year-old child who jumped from a building after failing his Chinese dictation test.

How can society alleviate such a deeply engrained pressure? It’s a huge challenge, but its importance has impelled Professor Lam and Professor Kathy Shum, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, to tackle it by focusing on changing the system – the family system and the school system and cultures. Both professors are educational psychologists and identify as system thinkers.

“It’s a very interconnected kind of relationship among teachers, parents, and students,” explains Professor Shum. “For instance, if the teacher has good well-being, that will have a very direct impact on their students. And when parents have very good parenting skills or mental health, that directly affects their kids and their parenting practices.”

The JC PandA Programme

Professor Lam, the Founding Director, initiated the JC PandA project – The Jockey Club ‘’Peace and Awareness”’ Mindfulness Culture in Schools Initiative, a wide-ranging, deep-reaching research intervention project. Funded since 2019 by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, the project trains teachers to teach mindfulness as part of schools’ social and emotional learning curriculum as a way to help students cope with pressure, as well as offering mindfulness courses to teachers and parents.

To date, JC PandA has offered over 100 eight-week courses to about 2,000 educators. It also reached more than 20,000 students by training more than 700 educators as mindfulness teachers. In one result, after completing the eight-week course, the percentage of teachers at risk of depression and anxiety fell from 30% to 18%. Parents also saw significant benefits after completing the programme, including reduced insomnia and stress, enhanced general mental health and life satisfaction, and positive changes in their children’s behaviour. The benefits were still evident two months later. Secondary school students showed significant improvements in mindfulness, gratitude, executive functioning and teacher-student relationships.

Following these encouraging results, a second phase of JC PandA was launched in 2022 and will run until the end of September 2026.

Mindfulness: Secular and Rooted in Science

Professor Lam first experienced the benefits of mindfulness at a retreat 15 years ago. She found the results impressive and was sure it could help reduce stress in education. First, though, she wanted scientific evidence.

“Then I found the data – large numbers of research pointing to the effectiveness of mindfulness,” she says. “In the past 30 to 40 years, there’s been a really exponential increase in research papers in international journals showing its effectiveness. As researcher, I’m convinced by these results.”

Over the past six years, she and Professor Shum, Principal Investigator of JC PandA, have brought mindfulness to more than 80 schools in Hong Kong, of all religious denominations.

“The mindfulness that we promote is totally secularized and also based on scientific research, with empirical evidence,” she emphasises.

They designed the programme to work as both a top-down and bottom-up mode

“We know as educational psychologists who work in the system that just the top-down model – where only the principal or head teacher is convinced – doesn’t work at all, because we also need the force from the bottom up,” explains Professor Lam. That means encouraging frontline teachers take the course. “They feel the benefit from it, they love it, they practice.”

Some teachers have approached the programme for training of their own accord and subsequently persuaded their school management to adopt the programme.
“I feel so happy about this,” says Professor Lam. “Then I really see how the bottom-up model is working, but it takes time.”

The programme includes simple mindfulness practices that parents can do with their children, such as the “petal practice”, when a child imagines their hand as a flower and their fingers are petals. As they breathe out, the petals open, breathe in and they close.

The team has also developed an innovative mindfulness app for older students, developed at HKU, which has been downloaded 47,000 times so far.

Legacy Programme

From the start, JC PandA was designed to be self-sustaining. Following a “train-the-trainer’’ model, the teachers – along with other professionals in schools such as social workers – directly teach mindfulness to students.

So far, about 2,000 school teachers and helping professionals have completed the eight-week mindfulness courses. Over 700 of them have received training to teach mindfulness. By creating this self-sufficient circular foundation, the professors aim to ensure that the benefits of mindfulness continue to be shared with many more people long after the JC PandA programme has ended.

“If people are healthy in terms of their psychological well-being, I guess a lot of things – the tragedies that we see on the news – all that will be less likely to happen,” says Professor Shum. “So I hope by doing this we can well create a better community with people having better psychological health.”

Professor Kathy Shum of the Department of Psychology and her team received the Faculty Knowledge Exchange Award 2025 for the project “Jockey Club ‘Peace and Awareness’ Mindfulness Culture in Schools Initiative”.

Contributing writer: Liana Cafolla