Students and teachers need better wellbeing support

14 January 2025

Mental health and wellbeing is declining across the world and people under 35 are particularly affected.

The Mental State of the World in 2023, the latest release in an annual study by not-for-profit Sapien Labs, reported that the dramatic declines in mental wellbeing during the pandemic years have persisted, “with no sign of recovery”.

In Australia, Beyond Blue’s 2024 National Mental Health in Education survey found that more than three-quarters of teachers and educators (77 per cent) rated mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, as the number one health concern weighing most heavily on children and young people.

The AEU’s 2024 State of Our Schools survey found that wellbeing in the school sector was falling.

More than two-thirds of principals and teachers reported a decline, or significant decline, in student wellbeing and engagement in the past 18 months, the AEU research found.

Over the same period, nine out of 10 teachers reported a decline, or significant decline, in teacher wellbeing and morale.

The crisis in wellbeing is a result of a complex mix of contributing factors, says Geri Sumpter, head of Be You at Beyond Blue, a federally funded national mental health and wellbeing initiative designed to support teachers and educators in early learning services, schools, and in pre-service settings. Be You consultants support schools and services to implement a whole learning community approach to mental health and wellbeing.

Sumpter says the lingering impact of the pandemic, critical incidents in schools, and natural disasters are partly to blame. “And there are new and compounding challenges from workforce shortages and turnover, working conditions, and the ever-growing expectations on educators,” she says.

More resources needed

Funding to address wellbeing in schools was identified as a priority in the expert panel’s 2023 report to inform a better and fairer education system, Improving Outcomes for All: The Report of the Independent Expert Panel’s Review to Inform a Better and Fairer Education System.

The expert panel acknowledged more support was needed for schools, including specialist staff, professional development and evidence-based resources for staff and better linkages between schools and allied services.

“For example, the presence in schools of wellbeing coordinators, access to professional counselling and psychology services either inside or outside schools, strategies to promote safe and inclusive environments and whole-of-school preventative approaches, and approaches to create positive cultures and environments provide possible ways to improve student wellbeing,” the panel’s report says.

The panel called for a national wellbeing measure to gauge whether investments in wellbeing support were having an impact.

It recommended “the measure should focus only on domains squarely within the remit of schools such as belonging, safety, cultural safety, engagement, and classroom disruption,” and build on the work already happening in the states and territories.

However, funding is under threat because negotiations between the Commonwealth and the states and territories have broken down. The Better and Fairer Schools Funding Agreement although requiring education departments to provide greater wellbeing support for learning and engagement, more full service schools, counsellors, wellbeing coordinators and mental health workers, doesn’t include additional funding above the minimum schooling resource standard that schools need to meet students’ educational needs.

This is why ACT, NSW, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria have not signed on.

In the meantime, schools are actively working to improve wellbeing for students and teachers.

Many have introduced positive behaviour programs to nurture a school culture of respect, responsibility and inclusiveness, and to reduce bullying and harassment.

The State of Our Schools survey found the lack of funding and resources create significant barriers to lifting wellbeing.

Only one in 10 principals said the level of counsellor support at their school was adequate and a quarter said children were waiting longer than two months on average to see a school counsellor, for instance, the AEU survey found.

The AEU is urging the government to do more to support student and teacher wellbeing by fulfilling its promise to fully fund every child across Australia.

Take your pick

Choosing how best to support students and teachers is a difficult navigation exercise, says Sumpter, who describes the landscape of mental health and wellbeing resources available to schools as “cluttered”.

“A lot of the time educators want to do something, but they don’t know what initiative or program to choose and why to choose it with the evidence base that it may or may not have,” she says.

Dr Katherine Dix, principal research fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), says schools can currently choose from about 500 wellbeing programs. Some, but not all, have been comprehensively reviewed and identified as quality programs in wellbeing program directories.

Be You has a free national program directory, which includes about 85 wellbeing programs and there are state government directories in Victoria (84 programs), New South Wales (66) and South Australia (58), says Dix.

But remote and regional schools often miss out because some programs are only offered in the cities, she says. It’s an issue ACER is hoping to address.

It is working with Tasmania’s department of health to develop a national resources directory, which would span issues such as alcohol and other drugs, suicide prevention, digital safety, bullying, body image and nutrition.

But knowing which program to implement is just the first step. Dix says evidence suggests that programs can be more effective when teachers are appropriately supported and trained to deliver them.

“It not only strengthens their knowledge and wellbeing around supporting their students but also means that the students receive ongoing exposure to the teachers’ enhanced skills,” she says.

“The biggest challenge is the additional burden this puts on teachers to not only deliver their own area of curriculum but also this additional capacity that’s very much widely seen as critical.”

The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey includes questions on staff wellbeing, teacher stress, burnout and dissatisfaction in their job. This year, for the first time, the 412 participating Australian schools, which includes 8000 teachers, will receive a snapshot of their staff wellbeing from the results.

“We’re really adamant about trying to make data available back to schools so there is a direct benefit for them participating,” says Dix, who is the national project manager for Australia’s participation in the survey.

Culturally nourishing schools project

[intro] Angela Byron, principal of Oak Flats High School, in the NSW Illawarra area, cannot sing the praises of the Culturally Nourishing Schools Project highly enough.

Over five years the school has worked to build a strong foundation of wellbeing and deeper relationships with First Nations students, parents, local Elders and community.

“It’s been a massive journey for us, but one that has resulted in significant change in our school and improvement in the students’ sense of belonging, improvements in attendance, improvements in academic performance so the outcome of it has been so broad-ranging and so much more than we’d even dared hope for,” says Byron.

The project, led by UNSW, with the University of Sydney, Griffith University, and Queensland University of Technology, supports teachers through scaffolded professional learning that involves working with local cultural mentors and engages teachers through learning from Country immersion experiences, targeted curriculum workshops, professional learning conversations and reading and pedagogical coaching.

Byron says the school, which has a 15 per cent Aboriginal student population, began working with Gubbi Gubbi man and Scientia Indigenous Fellow at UNSW Dr Kevin Lowe in 2016. Initially, his research asked Aboriginal parents and communities what they wanted from their local school. “They also spoke at length to students about who their favourite teachers were and what it was about that teacher that made them enjoy their lessons.”

The research was conducted in seven other NSW schools that had high Aboriginal enrolments and formed the foundation of the project.

A significant part of the project was the Learning from Country experience, says Byron. All staff spent a day at Coomaditchie, with Aunty Lorraine and Aunty Narelle [Brown]. “It was a traditional place wherelocal Wadi Wadi people lived but then had become a mission and it’s now a community hub for [the] local Aboriginal community.”

On another day they visited Aboriginal services such as the Aboriginal Medical Service, Warrigal Employment and the Aboriginal Men’s Shed: “There’s a whole range of services out there that our kids and their parents access that lots of our staff didn’t even know existed.”

Staff worked with an Aboriginal cultural mentor to consider how they were dealing with Aboriginal content and perspectives in their classroom.

“There are some aspects of Culture that aren’t really appropriate for non-Aboriginal people to teach,” she says, adding that the school needs to find ways of engaging community to help teach Culture and share storytelling. Bringing Aboriginal voices to the front.

Byron says the deeper understanding and relationships forged through the project have given teachers more confidence to teach and share Aboriginal perspectives.

“It’s certainly made the school a much better place in so many ways,” says Byron.

This article was originally published in the Australian Educator, Summer 2024