Wellbeing
Welcome to our new School Nurse Raelene
Meet Raelene the School Nurse. Raelene is here replacing Tracey for the next 12 months. Her role within the school is to support health promotion and wellbeing needs of the students. Students may see her around the school, popping into classes and helping with wellbeing programs at the school.
Outside of work Raelene likes to watch a lot of local cricket, football and netball due to her families involvement in local sporting clubs. She also enjoys camping and fishing along the Murray.
Live 4 Life
Cobram Secondary College is one of eight Moira Shire Schools who have entered a partnership with Uniting; Moira Shire Council, SalvoCare and Berry Street to bring the award winning Live4Life initiative to the Moira community.
Live4Life is about empowering rural Victorian communities to support, improve and invest in young people’s mental health and wellbeing, it is a whole of community approach to youth mental health and youth suicide prevention. The Live4Life model is currently being delivered in six rural Local Government areas: Baw Baw; Benalla; Glenelg; Macedon Ranges; Southern Grampians and here in Moira!
A component of this work is the delivery of evidence based mental health education to students and to the community.
After many interruptions due to Covid, we hope to soon be in a position to be able to offer Youth Mental Health First Aid Training to parents and other significant adults who are connected with young people.
We have been very excited to finally be delivering Teen Mental Health First Aid to our Year 11 students here at Cobram Secondary College these last two weeks and the Year 8’s will soon follow.
We have some fantastic local instructors from DET, Headspace, Salvocare and Uniting who are going to be delivering our training and at the same time galvanizing students’ knowledge of helpful services and resources that exist locally.
Teen MHFA Course will teach our Year 8 and Year 11 students how to provide mental health first aid to their friends. An important part of the training is understanding how to recognise when a friend isn’t tracking so well with their mental health, how to have important conversations and most importantly, how to engage a responsible and trusted adult, when needed, to ensure a young person gets the help they most need as quickly as possible.
We have had some great feedback already received from participants who have said that the training is “very helpful” “totally worth it” and “we learnt a lot”.
The TMHFA course was developed by Mental Health First Aid Australian and Melbourne University in response to research indicating that young people prefer, and are more likely to share problems they are experiencing with peers.
The course curriculum is evidence-based, informed by a study undertaken to determine the best actions a young person can undertake to support a peer with a mental health problem.
Youth Live4Life has also done extensive research on the effectiveness of the model in two other rural communities of Benalla and Glenelg Shire. You can read more about that here:
http://www.live4life.org.au/research/
Learn 2 Learn Wellbeing Sessions
The Wellbeing Team have been visiting Learn 2 Learn classes for all Year 7 and 8 students. They are delivering sessions all about “Taking Care of yourself”. The first session was all about self-esteem and working on feeling positive about yourself. The next sessions running in Week 6 are all around mindfulness and positive mental health and the final sessions in Week 9 will be all about taking care of your physical health
