Mental Health & Wellbeing

Student Voice & Fun

Dear Families,

Last term students in years four, five, and six completed the Attitudes to School Survey. Part of my role is to analyse the data from the survey and consider ways to help our students with their Social and Emotional Learning. 

An area of the survey that I looked at was Student Voice and Agency. Here is some data that I noticed:

• Just over half of our students feel that they have little say in helping decide things like class activities or rules
• Over 70% of our students think they have a say in the things they learn
• About three quarters of them think that their teacher likes their ideas
• A similar amount of our students feel that they are encouraged to share their ideas.

I often wonder about Student Voice and Agency and think about how we, as a school can address this. This is an area that we continue to be challenged by each year in this survey. To address this, we try many different research-based strategies. 

This week we engaged Dale Sidebottom from The School of Play to work with our Year Six Student Leadership group. Dale and his colleague Paul spent four sessions on Monday teaching our students how to lead play-based activities for younger students. This is a research project backed by La Trobe University where the Year Six students will have the opportunity to lead workshops for our Year Three students around the importance of play in building positive mental health. This will also give our leaders a chance to improve their student voice as they manage and coordinate the workshops. 

I look forward to seeing our Year Six leaders in action with the Year Three students over the coming weeks. 

Andy McNeilly

Mental Health and Wellbeing Leader