Part 3 of 3 in a Field notes series on grief at work. Part 1, When grief looks like disengagement, looked at how reduced capacity after a loss can be mistaken for disengagement. Part 2, Grief at work: leave is where support begins, looked at what happens when a grieving employee comes back.
Written by Mark S. Roach
Founder & Principal Advisor, Summit to Shore Human Centred Leadership Advisory. With more than 35 years of experience spanning healthcare, rehabilitation, disability management, workplace mental health, and insurance leadership, Mark writes about leadership, systems accountability, and the human experience behind organizational decisions.
About a 7 minute read
Since September 2026, state-funded primary schools in England must teach children something I was never taught at school: “that change and loss, including bereavement, can provoke a range of feelings, that grief is a natural response to bereavement, and that everyone grieves differently” (Department for Education, 2025).
Those children will start arriving in workplaces in the 2030s. All of them will have been told, early and plainly, that grief is normal and that it looks different for everyone.
What will they expect from the leaders they eventually work for? And here in Canada, where no national requirement like this exists, who teaches everyone else?
Young people are already grieving
Loss is not something young people meet only later in life. In a survey of 1,746 students aged 11 to 16 at two secondary schools in northern England, 78 per cent said they had been bereaved of a close relative or friend (Harrison & Harrington, 2001).
The pandemic added to that. In its first 14 months, an estimated 8,886 children in England and Wales lost a primary caregiver (Hillis et al., 2021).
For Canada, I could find no measured figure. The first global estimates of pandemic caregiver loss modelled 21 countries, and Canada was not among them (Hillis et al., 2021). We know it happened here. We don’t know how often.
What Canadian research does show is young people finding their own ways through. In Victoria, BC, street-involved youth live with “the all too frequent deaths of people they know, rely on, and care about.” They use social media as a “moral laboratory” to express grief, rage, and hope, and to support each other (Selfridge & Mitchell, 2020). They are building grief literacy that no one taught them.
What learning about grief can do
Grief doesn’t stay home when a young person goes to school. A review of 22 studies from eight countries found that bereavement is generally linked to lower grades and lower educational attainment. Some studies also pointed to a higher risk of dropping out, especially at points of transition (Elsner et al., 2022). The pattern will sound familiar from Part 1: capacity drops, and the institution sees a performance problem.
Can teaching about grief help? The evidence is early, but encouraging. In northern Italy, 87 secondary students aged 16 to 20 took a two-month death education course that brought them into conversation with palliative care professionals, including at a local hospice. Compared with 76 students who didn’t take part, they became better at identifying and naming their own emotions, with no negative effects (Testoni et al., 2021). The classes chose to take part, so it was not a randomized trial.
Most studies like this are small, short, and based on self-report, and I found little evidence yet that grief education reduces depression or other mental health conditions over time. What they suggest is more modest, and still worth knowing: people can learn to recognize and talk about grief, and the learning doesn’t seem to hurt them.
What young people say they want
Lauren Breen and colleagues asked young people directly. In an Australian co-designed study, 42 people aged 14 to 24 worked through what grief literacy should mean. Their definition was simple: “knowing about grief, showing support to grieving people, and being caring and compassionate to themselves and others” (Breen et al., 2025).
Two things stand out for employers. First, they wanted to learn about grief before they needed it. They described a universal, preventive approach, not help that arrives only after a loss. As one participant put it, “If I had known about grief, I would have handled it better.”
Second, they named work. Some suggested that grief literacy could become part of workplace induction programs.
It is one small study in one country, but it is a rare case of young people being asked, and their answer leads straight to the workplace.
England’s choice, Canada’s path
England made grief part of a national requirement. It has limits. The bereavement content sits at primary level, and independent schools are not bound by the same requirement. Still, it signals something: grief is now treated as something children should understand before they need it, rather than a private matter to be managed alone.
Canada has no equivalent, and no single national lever to create one. Education is a provincial and territorial responsibility. Each province and territory sets its own curriculum, and public, Catholic, francophone, and independent schools deliver it under different arrangements.
The work is happening, but in pieces. Some of it is long-standing: King’s University College in London, Ontario, has taught death education since 1976 and now offers thanatology degrees and a certificate in grief and bereavement studies (King’s University College, n.d.). Cadell et al. (2025) have set out a national, bilingual study of grief and grief support needs in Canada. At the University of Guelph, Cox et al. (2025) developed Creating Space for Grief, an evidence-informed bereavement support program for post-secondary students, now offered as a therapy group (University of Guelph, n.d.). In Ontario, the Children and Youth Grief Network, a community partnership across Halton, Peel, and Toronto, has researched how grief intersects with marginalization and diversity (Children and Youth Grief Network, n.d.). In Saint John, New Brunswick, Law et al. (2023) piloted an expressive arts program for grieving youth. It was small, six young people aged 15 to 18, and its authors describe the results as preliminary. Participants still described it as a safe space that eased their isolation.
This is careful, committed work. But a specialist university department, a research study, a campus program, a regional network, and a small pilot are not a system. A leader in Nova Scotia may never hear of any of them.
Where that leaves employers
If there is no single place where young Canadians learn about grief, there is one place many of them will eventually share: work.
There is a Canadian precedent. As more of the responsibility for retirement shifted to individuals, financial literacy became a shared national effort. Canada launched its first National Strategy for Financial Literacy in 2015. The current strategy names employers among its key players and describes financial literacy as “embraced in more workplaces, communities, and homes” (Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, 2021).
The evidence behind it is encouraging, though not settled. Canadians who answered three basic financial questions correctly were about 10 percentage points more likely to have retirement savings, an association rather than proof of cause (Boisclair et al., 2017). People who had taken a financial education course showed more financial knowledge and more confidence in managing money (Rothwell & Wu, 2019).
Money, too, was once treated as a private matter. Grief may follow a similar path. It is unlikely to reach every young person through a single curriculum. It can reach them through the organizations they join.
That does not have to mean a new program. It means doing consistently what this series has described: seeing reduced capacity for what it is, rather than mistaking it for disengagement, and treating the return after a loss as the start of support, not the end of it. Breen’s participants add a third idea that costs little: talk about grief before anyone needs to. In induction, in leader development, and in the ordinary conversations where a team learns what is safe to say.
Over the coming decade, some of the people who join your organization will have been taught that grief is normal and that reduced capacity after a loss is expected. Others will have learned it the hard way. Some will not have learned it at all. A grief-literate workplace serves all three.
No one can know yet what the next generation of workers will expect. But I suspect the question they bring will be a simple one: when loss arrives, will this be a place where I can say so?
A question worth sitting with
What would a grief-literate workplace look like where you lead? Not as a policy, but in a new hire’s first week, in the first conversation after a loss, and in the meeting where someone quietly says they’re not at full capacity today.
This closes the series. My thanks to Sylvia Wolfer, who contributed to Parts 1 and 2, and to Carmen Bellows, who contributed to Part 2.
If this series raised something for you, I’d welcome hearing it.
Sources
Boisclair, D., Lusardi, A., & Michaud, P.-C. (2017). Financial literacy and retirement planning in Canada. Journal of Pension Economics & Finance, 16(3), 277–296. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474747215000311
Breen, L. J., Zammit, T., Payne, N., Lobo, R., Black, A., & Egan, S. J. (2025). A world that recognises, validates, and supports young people’s grief: A co-designed study. Health Promotion Journal of Australia, 36(4), e70083. https://doi.org/10.1002/hpja.70083
Cadell, S., Wright, D. K., Dosani, N., Cherblanc, J., Breen, L., Aoun, S., Sequeira, L., Kortes-Miller, K., Arya, A., Anthony, K., Boudreau, C., Prince, H., Thompson, M., & Macdonald, M. E. (2025). Grief and grief support needs in Canada: A mixed methods protocol. Palliative Care and Social Practice, 19. https://doi.org/10.1177/26323524251334180
Children and Youth Grief Network. (n.d.). Research. https://www.childrenandyouthgriefnetwork.com/research/
Cox, A., Boyle, S., Newby-Clark, E., & Lumley, M. (2025). Creating space for grief: Development of evidence-informed bereavement support program for post-secondary students. Journal of College Student Development, 66, 209–222. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2025.a958767
Department for Education. (2025). Relationships education, relationships and sex education (RSE) and health education: Statutory guidance for governing bodies, proprietors, head teachers, principals, senior leadership teams, and teachers. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/relationships-education-relationships-and-sex-education-rse-and-health-education
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Harrison, L., & Harrington, R. (2001). Adolescents’ bereavement experiences: Prevalence, association with depressive symptoms, and use of services. Journal of Adolescence, 24(2), 159–169. https://doi.org/10.1006/jado.2001.0379
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Selfridge, M., & Mitchell, L. M. (2020). Social media as moral laboratory: Street involved youth, death and grief. Journal of Youth Studies, 23(4), 502–518.
Testoni, I., Palazzo, L., Ronconi, L., Donna, S., Cottone, P., & Wieser, M. (2021). The hospice as a learning space: A death education intervention with a group of adolescents. BMC Palliative Care, 20, 54. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12904-021-00747-w
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