Wellbeing and Engagement 

Two weeks ago three of our staff went to a conference on the new Resilience, Rights, and Respectful Relationships course, which will be compulsory for all Victorian Schools starting in 2026. The speaker at this conference was Emeritus Professor Helen Cahill who was the lead author of the new program. She explained how the program has been trialled in schools and modified as students and teachers gave feedback on how to make it more relevant to the current situations that young people come across.

Helen explained that children now have free access to technology and are viewing explicit content when unsupervised. At school, these sites are blocked but through home servers your children can view anything and once they have, the algorithms send them pop ups to entice them to a variety of undesirable sites.

There are apps that you can use at home which block these sites so that your children have restricted access, such as Netnanny. The school suggests that the school devices are only used in shared places in the house and not in student’s rooms unsupervised. Also, children’s phones can have access to apps on their phones locked or limited. Following are links to show how to do this. Even if your child uses your phone to access certain games you can put time limits on them.

Apple Devices

https://support.apple.com/en-au/108806

Android Devices

https://families.google/familylink/

Edenhope College will begin the Resilience, Rights, and Respectful Relationship program next semester across the whole school. There will be an overview of the program sent out to all families before this, so rich conversations can be had at home, aligned with the content that is being taught at school.

Alison Hausler

Head of Wellbeing and Engagement