Six months on …

Schools have been implementing the new behaviour policy and procedures for six months now and It’s time for a pulse check!

Meeting fortnightly with the team led by Executive Director, Laura Milkins. Executive Director Inclusion and Wellbeing, your PPA team is keen to present your thoughts to them about implementation of the key reforms of the “E” of the Inclusive, Engaging, Respectful Schools Strategy that underpinned the behaviour policy and procedures changes.

These key reforms were:

• reducing the length of suspensions
• more support for students with disability to access the curriculum
• early intervention and targeted support for vulnerable student groups
• removing prohibited restrictive practices
• a new model to help meet the needs of students with complex, challenging and unsafe behaviours
• increased access by schools and students to an expanded dedicated workforce comprising specialist staff including allied health and behaviour support services
• improving access to behaviour specialists for schools and students in regional and remote locations.

At your next local council meeting, state delegates and presidents will run a session to capture your thoughts around the positive and/or negative impacts of the Student Behaviour Strategy on your school to take back to the team at a future meeting. With new school behaviour support and management plans to be completed and ready for implementation by the end of Term 2 2023 and uploaded to the school’s website, it is important that you have system support to complete this important work.

I was privileged to attend the National Public Education Wellbeing Summit recently held in South Australia with our president, Robyn Evans, and Student Wellbeing Reference Group Chair, Helen Craigie. The summit gathered educators, researchers, data and policy subject matter experts from across Australia to develop and strategise a national approach to student wellbeing. Facilitated over two days, the 140 participants distilled their thoughts to produce a collective way forward.

Each participant committed to having a call to action and my overarching take-away was that instead of measuring wellbeing, we should be measuring equity, as it is this measure that underpins our students overall wellbeing. The National Goals of Schooling are around excellence AND equity and while we have NAPLAN (and other measures eg PISA) to determine excellence, there are no measures of equity.

My call to action is to speak about this notion that unless we address the widening equity gap across our schooling systems by changing the conversation from addressing wellbeing to addressing equity, students in the public schools we serve will never achieve their full potential.