Young people’s mental health and well-being

In highlighting the need for a greatly enhanced and appropriately resourced emphasis on young people’s mental health and positive social and emotional development, the Australian Government rightly recognises the importance not only of early identification of potential risk factors – but also and at least as importantly, putting in place processes to enhance the positive environments and protective factors which support young people’s building of resilience, well-being, community engagement, positive outlook and a sense of optimism for the future.

In making these announcements, both the Prime Minister and the Health Minister have specifically noted the vitally important role of teachers and parents – a role that as much about building a positive and supportive developmental environment for young people as about supporting those at risk. Prevention from the early stages being much better and more cost-effective than remediation further down the track.

That this provides the essential underpinning to enable the building of schools as integrated learning communities and to enable young people to achieve their full potential in all aspects of their learning and personal development is well understood by the national parent bodies – not only through the extensive and corroborative body of research from overseas over the past thirty years and more – but also by their own action research in some hundreds of school communities in all parts of Australia over the past decade.

The Australian Government identified the need for an effective parent and family led program drawing on these understandings – and in 2002 commissioned the national parent organisations to develop such a program building upon the learnings from our previous and current additional research – validating every step of the program’s development across a range of school communities.

That program was launched in 2003 as “Families Matter: families & schools working together to ensure the emotional well-being of young people” – and was enthusiastically taken up by some 200 schools and their communities across the country.

The program ran effectively and successfully until 2006: when the then government and department decided – against all the evidence of an overwhelmingly positive external evaluation report and its recommendations for further continuance and embedding of the program – and despite the ongoing protests of those school communities that had proven the value and efficacy of this community partnership-building initiative – not to renew the funding arrangements beyond 2006.

Findings from the external evaluation included in particular:

“The experience of the program by school communities was uniformly favourable and for the same main reasons we had heard before. These are important one and bear re-stating.

• Families Matter gives parents a means of coming together and discussing issues about the raising and educating of children in a way that adds to their own coping and parenting skills. It does this, moreover, by allowing parents to decide what it is they want to talk about, and how they want to talk about it.
• Families Matter creates a vehicle for partnerships between families and schools. It is prized by principals and school staff for this quality.
• Families Matter gives some parents new self-confidence and contributes to their personal development.

“…These observations have led us to think that it might be useful to think about asking Families Matter schools to hold an annual “refresher” so that each generation of new parents has an opportunity to be introduced to the Families Matter concepts.

“Families Matter provides a vehicle for much good work. It helps to inform parents about important concepts such as resilience, and helps them articulate challenges and find solutions.

Thus equipped, parents are enabled to act. It is like dropping a pebble in a pond. There is no telling what, on some far embankment, those ripples might touch: they take on a life of their own. At the same time, the value of the originating force should not be forgotten. The concepts presented in the materials are informative, enduring and empowering. “

The Australian Council of State School Organisations, and the Australian Parents Council, who jointly developed, ran and validated the effectiveness of “Families Matter” initiative to achieve parents and teachers working together to support young people’s resilience, well-being and engagement in strong sustaining networked communities, are firmly of the view that a renewal of funding for this proven effective program should be a central element in the Government’s strategies for schools and their communities.