“So there were increases in hope, life satisfaction and coping skills, and a significant 34 per cent decrease in the odds of anxiety and a 47 per cent decrease in the odds of depression among young people attending those intervention schools.
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“There’s lots of funding for these types of school-based programs, but it’s still really important to make sure that what we’re implementing in schools is actually effective when it comes to mental health outcomes.”
At St Bede’s College in Mentone, deputy principal Mark Jones said he and his colleagues never expected quick fixes when they hired the Resilience Project in 2021 to deliver its program at the Catholic boys’ school.
“We never really expected it to show results straightaway,” Jones said.
“What we did realise … was coming out of COVID, our kids needed more support than we could offer.”
Jones said the school started off with the basics, and after four years of setting aside an hour each fortnight for students to work on their mental wellbeing, he is happy with the results.
“We started with something very basic, talking with the boys about having emotional literacy,” the deputy principal said.
“Boys are not great at talking about problems, so to arm them with that, we found that the spillover was that we’re getting great empathy, where kids were starting to identify the feelings of others.”
Resilience is not the only wellbeing program at St Bede’s, where drug education, a junior developmental program, respectful relationships and positive masculinity classes are all offered to boys there.
“All of these things sort of work together,” Jones said.
“But we really are building around our Resilience Project relationship, and they are the cornerstone of what we’re doing in the school.”
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The Resilience Project is a private organisation that describes itself as a “profit for purpose” enterprise and charges schools $20 per student each year to deliver its programs.
Chief executive Ben Waterman said the project offered concessions to underprivileged schools – particularly in rural and regional Australia, where schools often lacked the resources of their wealthier city counterparts – and worked hard to ensure the program could be delivered, regardless of a school’s ability to pay.
But Balasooriya called on governments to do more to resource the fight for young people’s mental health.
“It’s really important that the government is actually supporting schools with funding, with staff capacity to be able to implement school based mental health programs, because maybe a private school would have greater capacity to do that than a public school,” she said.
“So that’s what’s really needed in terms of government funding and resourcing to make sure that the outcomes are equitable across schools in Australia.”
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