India loses 38 students to suicide every single day. Hubert Jerome says the adults who could stop it are already in the building, they just haven’t been trained yet. His company, My Safe Spaces, is on a mission to change that for good.

Here is a number that should keep every school board chair in the world awake at night: 1,000.

That is the approximate number of contact hours a teacher logs with students in a single academic year. Over the course of a child’s schooling, teachers will collectively spend more waking hours with that child than their own parents will. And yet, across an education sector that spans hundreds of millions of students globally, those teachers receive precisely zero hours of formal training in how to recognise a mental health crisis unfolding right in front of them.

In the corporate world, that kind of gap between frontline exposure and frontline preparedness would trigger an immediate liability review. In the global education sector, it has been standard operating procedure for decades.

Hubert Jerome, the founder of My Safe Spaces (MSS), wants to end that paradox, permanently.

THE CRISIS IN PLAIN SIGHT

The statistics are staggering. Every day in India, 38 students are lost to suicide, that is more than 13,000 young lives extinguished every year. For decades, the institutional response has been remarkably uniform and remarkably inadequate: hire one school counsellor for every two thousand students, print some wellness posters, and hope for the best.

“We’re training for emergencies that rarely happen while ignoring the one affecting one in seven of our students right now.”

, Hubert Jerome, Founder, My Safe Spaces

Jerome is not interested in adding another meditation app to the crowded EdTech marketplace. He is targeting something far more fundamental: the infrastructural root of why schools keep failing their most vulnerable students. Through the SWISS (Student Wellbeing & Institutional Safety Standards) framework, MSS is replacing the reactive “single counsellor” bottleneck with a proactive, CPD UK-accredited system that transforms the people already closest to students, their teachers, into trained mental health gatekeepers.

And the scale of his ambition is enormous. Fresh off securing a landmark partnership with the Association of International Schools of India (TAISI) to reach one million students, and backed by sweeping new CBSE mandates requiring mandatory mental health training for all school staff, Jerome sat down with The CEO Magazine to explain why the business of student safety is long overdue for a disruption, and why My Safe Spaces is the company built to deliver it.

THE INTERVIEW

You’ve built your platform on tearing down what you call the “Contact Hours Paradox.” Why is the current model of school counselling failing?

Hubert Jerome: It’s a complete failure of resource allocation. Teachers spend over 1,000 hours a year with our children, yet receive zero hours of mental health training. We’ve created a system where those closest to our students are the least equipped to help them.

Mental wellness in schools cannot be one counsellor for 2,000 students. It’s an impossible ratio. The intention from school leadership is there, but the infrastructure isn’t. We don’t have a shortage of caring teachers, we have a shortage of trained ones.

The immediate pushback from school boards must be about bandwidth. Teachers are already stretched thin. Aren’t you asking them to do a clinical psychologist’s job?

Hubert Jerome: Absolutely not. We don’t expect teachers to be therapists any more than we expect them to be firefighters. But every school has a fire drill protocol. We train teachers to safely evacuate a building.

We are training them to be capable first responders. We’re not replacing school counsellors, we’re multiplying their reach. A child in distress doesn’t schedule an appointment with a counsellor. They reach out to whoever is closest, a teacher, a coach, an ayah. Those are the people we train to recognise a warning sign and safely escalate it.

“Posters on walls don’t save lives. Trained adults do.”

Hubert Jerome

The EdTech market is flooded with student wellness solutions. Why go through the rigorous process of building an internationally accredited certification standard?

Hubert Jerome: Because posters on walls don’t save lives. Trained adults do.

The question isn’t whether schools care about student mental health, they do. The question is whether they have the auditable systems to act on that care. That’s what certification answers. SWISS moves schools from vague awareness to structured action. Our certification is internationally accredited because student safety deserves global standards, not just good intentions.

The CBSE recently mandated biannual mental health training for all school staff in India. How does that validate your model?

Hubert Jerome: It proves the era of treating mental health as a “nice-to-have” is officially over. We are in the era of duty of care.

But compliance can’t just be about avoiding a penalty. When a school commits to SWISS certification, they’re doing more than checking a CBSE box. Stigma thrives in silence. When schools openly train staff in mental health, they send a powerful message to students: it’s safe to ask for help here. You’re telling them their mental health matters just as much as their marks.

You’re targeting one million students in your first year alone. When you look five years down the road, what does ultimate success look like for My Safe Spaces?

Hubert Jerome: India loses 38 students to suicide every single day. Behind each one of those numbers is a warning sign someone saw but didn’t know how to act on.

I refuse to believe that 13,000 student suicides a year is inevitable. Success is making that statistic obsolete. For every tragedy in the headlines, there are thousands of quiet interventions by trained adults who noticed, who asked, who listened. Those stories don’t make the news, but they’re the ones that matter. SWISS exists to make sure those quiet interventions happen in every classroom, every single day.

Hubert Jerome is the Founder of My Safe Spaces. For more information on the SWISS certification framework, visit mysafespaces.com