Wellbeing & Inclusion News

Hello,

I’m Sarah, I’m the wellbeing worker at FWPS. I wanted to introduce myself and provide some information about my role.

I’m a social worker and have worked primarily in mental health in my career. I really love my work here and the thoughtful, proactive FWPS school community. I have already enjoyed meeting or talking to some of you and your children and offering some support.

I work a five-day fortnight, and my role is to provide short-term counselling and support to students, and to support whole of school wellbeing initiatives. Some examples of what I do include running groups/information sessions for students, running information sessions on mental health for staff, and this year I will run some parent sessions on wellbeing and mental health, and how you can support your children.

Regarding counselling - typically when an educator or parent identifies that a student needs some extra support, we will discuss it in our weekly Wellbeing Team meeting. I don’t have capacity to see every student identified, and students are triaged based on urgency, ability to access external supports, as well as my capacity at the time. I will typically see a student for a few sessions – if further support is required I will recommend you find an external counsellor (I can provide them with a handover). 

If you think your child requires some extra support, please talk to their teacher as a first point of contact, and any concerns will be passed on to the Wellbeing Team. If I can’t see a student, we will suggest other options to access support. 

I also wanted to let you know that we will be funded for the Mental Health in Primary Schools Program in 2024. The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System highlighted that primary schools provide opportunities to identify children with mental health and wellbeing challenges, who can then be referred for treatment, care, and support. This funding will provide further tools to support wellbeing in FWPS.

Take care,

Sarah

Help us to Help Students!

To help the wellbeing team decide on areas of wellbeing to focus on over the next six months (especially for parent information sessions), we would love it if you could complete this 15-minute survey for families from Be You. Staff have recently completed the educator survey and we would love input from families too.

Be You is a commonwealth-funded initiative to promote mental health and wellbeing in schools and early learning centres across Australia. It has tools and resources including very thorough free online modules and fact sheets. It’s delivered via Beyond Blue, with Early Childhood Australia and headspace. You can find more information about it here > About Be You - Be You.

Surveys are anonymous – individual respondents can’t be identified. The link to complete the survey is specific to FWPS and only the leadership team in our school will be able to access the (de-identified) data. So please feel free to be very honest about where you see the strengths and areas for improvement at FWPS. 

You can participate in the survey here: https://beyou.syd1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8BrqyFHxHoJ4DXv?survey_id=11778271393

Survey information is also attached.