FROM THE ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL

WELL BEING AT MURRUMBEENA PRIMARY SCHOOL

Murrumbeena Primary School takes action to provide an environment and curriculum that supports students to develop knowledge, understanding and skills to manage their own health and wellbeing. 

This year, our focus is on the following:

• The Peer Support Program- Why? Being rejected and ostracised can hurt. Developing friendship skills at school may help young people to navigate relationships throughout their lives. When a person has the support of a couple of really good friends, they are able to navigate tougher times.
• Bullying Prevention – Why? When a young person engages in bullying behaviour we can help them to learn more positive ways of relating to people. Likewise, students benefit from learning strategies to deal with people who are more strong willed or bossy and when we take action together, we can stamp out bullying.
• Emotional Intelligence- Why? The skills of communicating well and getting along with others are very important and can be improved with practice. Recognising social cues and knowing how to adjust behaviour involves a developed sense of emotional intelligence.
• Wellbeing ‘Lunchtime drop in’ – Why? We ALL have times when we come across people who we are not sure how to relate to. Sometimes we have a falling out with our friends and we’re not sure how to manage the situation. It’s for reasons like this, we invite students to drop into the IRC at lunch time to have a chat with our ‘Masters of Counselling Monash Students.’
• Counselling- means talking things over with someone, listening to their problems, helping to find solutions and supporting them through the bad times. Families and friends often take on counselling roles for each other. At our school we currently have counsellors trained to help kids with their problems.
• Parent Support- We do our best as parents but sometimes we need a little help too. Just running our ideas by someone who has experience with children and strategies helps.  Parents are welcome to make an appointment to speak with one of our counsellors.

PARTNERSHIPS

Our school has a partnership with Monash University where we support the placement of university students studying their ‘Masters of Counselling’.  Our current placement students are Marina Klose and Patricia Guzman-Moreno. All counselling students are supervised by an experienced practitioner (who may be trained as a counsellor or psychologist). Counselling students are committed to safe and ethical practice. They have a Working with Children Check and undertake their work in accordance with the Child Safe Standards and the National Code of Conduct.

Marina and Tricia will be undertaking a range of wellbeing activities within our school including:

• Delivering lessons in classrooms in response to class needs
• Mentoring the student PLAY Ambassadors to run the lunch time ‘PLAY’ program.
• Establishing a wellbeing ‘drop in and chat’ centre (in the IRC at lunch time)
• Supporting students on an individual basis as required.
• Parent Support

If you DO NOT want your child to participate in individual counselling (should the need arise), please contact the school to let us know.