School and Community Wellbeing

Our work aims to prevent adverse childhood experiences that threaten wellbeing, such as bullying; and to reduce inequities in social-emotional wellbeing due to disadvantage.

Utilising the latest research from developmental health and implementation science, our team strives to ensure the best outcomes for all children, regardless of their educational, community and family circumstances.

The School and Community Wellbeing team, led by Dr Kevin Runions, has wide-ranging experience in psychology, health promotion, education, implementation science, public health, policy development, digital health, neurodiversity, developmental psychopathology, communications science, and mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) research. The team has an extensive network of partners and collaborators across public, non-government and philanthropic agencies and broad collective experience in the research and tertiary sectors.

Our expertise lies in working effectively with schools and the broader community, including parents and carers to help children and adolescents thrive in their rapidly changing world.  We work with parents and carers, educators, juvenile justice, and other key figures in children’s lives to support knowledge in what to do, build confidence in their capacity and skills to do it, and understand why it matters. 

Our team works alongside schools, families and community agencies to promote mental health and social-emotional wellbeing. What happens in schools – beyond the academics – is critical for child wellbeing. Australian research indicates that more than 2 in 5 young people feel stressed most or all of the time, and school is a major source of that stress. Students who experience poor wellbeing are at risk of becoming disengaged from school. Experiences that happen in and out of schools, such as bullying and cyberbullying, place students at further risk.

We have a 20+ year history of working to reduce school-based risks like bullying through robust research of Friendly Schools, a whole-school social-emotional learning initiative to reduce risks such as bullying and improve outcomes including depression, anxiety and loneliness. We work to address both the social and physical setting of schools, such as through the Building Out Bullying program led by Dr Jacinta Francis. 

We work alongside schools to ensure they have the means to identify student needs and the tools to ensure effective implementation of wellbeing and mental health promotion for their students and staff, including our cutting-edge implementation science work on the Online Assessment, Support and Implementation System (OASIS), led by Dr Natasha Pearce.

The School and Community Wellbeing team aims to find new ways to empower, affirm and support contemporary families, whatever their make-up, to provide their children with optimal home environments – and to enjoy the journey!  We work alongside families, schools, early learning services, child health services, advocates and policy makers to investigate the diverse manifestations of parenting in contemporary Australian society, and to find effective ways to place our findings into the hands of families and policy-makers and practitioners who work to support families.  Drs Lynne Millar and Rosemary Cahill lead our work with the Early Years Initiative - a ground breaking partnership to empower communities to support children’s development, health and learning from birth to age 4. The research conducted by this team will assist families to make the most of what schools and other services in their communities provide to optimise the development, health and learning of their children and young people – now and into the future.

We have also identified the key role fathers play in their children’s lives and our research led by Dr Vincent Mancini, aims to support dads to be the best parent they can be. Dr Robyn Johnston has combined her research into alcohol-related harms and the impact that fathers can have on their children’s opinions and behaviours relating to alcohol consumption.

To ensure children’s wellbeing, we must go beyond school and families and delve into the other aspects of a child’s community including the online environment. Our team was the first in Australia to study cyberbullying and we remain international leaders in cybersafety. The award-winning Beacon app supports parents to mediate their children’s digital technology use, and the Cyber Friendly Primary Schools intervention has been shown to reduce cyberbullying and improve parent and teacher confidence and capacities to support healthy use of digital technology.

For other children, community settings play a big role in their lives.  We are also working with Western Australian arts groups to promote social emotional wellbeing through the arts. This project builds on our wellbeing research, which was previously implemented in the school environment, but translates these interventions into the arts space. This work is led by Dr Leanne Fried. 

Our team have worked with the Banksia Hill Project to improve the capacity of staff to work with neurodiversity and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder in particular. Led by Dr Hayley Passmore, the Reframe intervention aims to educate frontline professionals about recognising and understanding neuro-diversity among young people, reframing their behaviours, and responding appropriately to their needs. 

Children who face disadvantage, whether due to family financial challenges, from behavioural or emotional problems, or from neurodiversity, all face particular challenges in fulfilling their potential. Interventions that address the whole-school community – students, staff, and families – are needed to ensure the best outcomes for all young people. Through our work with the Life Course Centre, Dr Runions, Dr Pearce, Dr Jon Sae-Koew, and the Early Years Initiative team work with schools, communities and families to ensure all students have the social emotional learning essential to keep them psychologically well and engaged with their school, and to ensure equity in outcomes regardless of the students’ circumstances. We work with families to ensure they can effectively guide their children in school, and to ensure that all families become part of the school community, even those facing deep disadvantage.

The School and Community Wellbeing team works alongside schools, families, and government in Western Australia and beyond, and have been active in ensuring that the people who stand to benefit most from our work are able to easily access it. We have been leaders in engaging consumers in co-design of interventions and guidelines for mental health promotion. We have worked closely in consulting with schools and governments across Australia and internationally, including Independent Schools Australia, the NSW Department of Education and the South Australian Department of Education. We have established extensive research collaborations with researchers globally to ensure effective promotion of wellbeing and mental health for children and adolescents.