A recent nationwide survey by NAB found that while Australian students report improved emotional and mental wellbeing and less loneliness, more than 50% consider their school’s wellbeing programs ineffective.
A separate study into the occupational health and wellbeing of school principals revealed one five reported moderate to severe depression, with early career leaders suffering greater levels of anxiety than their more experienced peers. Others admitted being at risk of serious mental health concerns, including burnout, stress, and trouble sleeping.
Unfortunately, as schools try to navigate these challenges, the problems faced by overworked teachers are being intensified by expectations placed on them to manage their own wellbeing.
When looking at the current wellbeing landscape in Australia’s schools, an apt metaphor comes to mind: In the event of a loss of cabin pressure in an airplane, passengers should always put on their own oxygen mask first before assisting others. However, as the above studies show, many teachers feel like that oxygen supply is already too low to make much of a difference.
Exacerbating this crisis, many current wellbeing programs are limited in scope and don’t go far enough to support the early intervention of wellbeing issues.
Enter Visible Wellbeing.
Based on 25 years of published research by Order of Australia recipient, Professor Lea Waters from the University of Melbourne, Visible Wellbeing addresses the shortfalls that many existing programs experience by not only making sure that issues are tackled early on, but that the solutions are sustainable so that a strong culture of wellbeing can permeate throughout the school.
Visible Wellbeing is a Tier 1 approach to positive mental health that provides training, coaching, resources and a large menu of more than 250 Visible Wellbeing Strategies to leaders, teachers, and school staff. Its strategies be embedded into lesson plans, classroom management, assemblies, sport, co-curricular, camps and the staff room.
“Even pre-COVID, principals invited me to discuss the need for instructional techniques around wellbeing, shifting focus from just learning outcomes,” Professor Waters told The Educator. “Around this time, I noticed a shift towards understanding what wellbeing could look like, and now it's about how we need it.”
Professor Waters said global research and on-the-ground work show higher rates of emotional reactivity and stress in students and teachers.
“Stress arises when demands outweigh resources. COVID's legacy effects heighten demands, leading to emotional reactivity, distractibility, and violence,” she said. “Trauma during COVID affected many, leaving lingering aftereffects. Consequently, we're seeing increased behavioral issues, stress, and distress in schools.”
A unique approach that makes a real difference
Professor Waters said one key distinguish between Visible Wellbeing and other providers is that the former shifts the school's mentality from wellbeing as a program to a series of practices.
“This paradigm shift prevents the siloed approach where wellbeing is confined to specific lessons. Instead, practices are small and can occur at any moment, benefiting both students and adults,” she said. “This flexibility ensures wellbeing is for everyone, not just specific teachers or time slots.”
The approach begins with the adults, delivering practices and strategies for their wellbeing, which then cascade to students. Professor Waters said this approach creates a healthier school culture, starting with staff and impacting students positively.
“The framework itself, is based on large meta-analysis of 18,400 published psychology studies over an 18-year time period from 700 peer reviewed Psychology Journals that came up with the six key pillars for wellbeing,” Professor Waters said.
“We've then evaluated it, but the outcome is quite beautiful in that we what we know from systems theory is that you get synergistic effects.”
Professor Waters said if leaders are talking about management best practice from a wellbeing perspective, it can't just be bringing in a student curriculum or just having training, because that's only one element.
“You need more than one element to create system change.”
Lightening the load – for everyone
Professor Waters said the Visible Wellbeing Strategies (VWBS) help to increase leaders’ resources by building capacity in both students and staff.
“There are a lot of demands that school leaders would love to take away from their staff, from their students, but they can't. So, if we can't really change the demands, if we can't reduce the demands, what we want to try and do is increase capacity, increase resources,” she said.
“If we're increasing resources in the students, then they're able to better manage, so that doesn't go up as much to staff; and if we're increasing capacity in staff, they're able to better manage and it doesn't go up to the leader. The Visible Wellbeing approach really lightens the load of everyone.”
Professor Waters said each staff member and student can flexibly use the strategies how they want, so it's not just left up to the principal, deputy principal, head of wellbeing, or school psychologist.
“The idea is, if you want to build a wall, if each person just adds one brick, then you've, built something that is a barrier to some of the external problems coming in, but no one’s carrying a particularly heavy load to do that.”
More capacity, less stress
Professor Waters said the extensive research she has done shows that teachers who use the Visible Wellbeing approach improve their capacity to respond to stress.
“We see teachers and staff having a greater awareness of their own strengths and how to utilise their strengths when things are going well and when things are not going so well,” she said.
“There is also greater collegiality and compassion at cultural level of their schools. These are all indicators of increased capacity to be resilient.”
Professor Waters said the approach not only helps teachers build resilience but also enhances their overall wellbeing by fostering an environment that prioritises personal growth and adaptability.
“When we think about what we want to cultivate in schools from a cultural perspective, we want to cultivate connectivity, and that all-important sense of belonging is a key part of that,” she said. “We want to cultivate capability, and we want to cultivate capacity.”
Professor Waters referred to capacity as “the ability to flex and expand as situations change”.
“What we have seen in the published evaluation is that we're increasing capability, particularly around mental health strategies, or the adults in the school or the staff in the school,” she said. “We're increasing their capacity to expand and adapt and be able to take on more without it causing that resource demand imbalance.”
Professor Waters said another important element being measured is weaving classroom strategies into good pedagogy so that it's not “wellbeing versus teaching, and not wellbeing versus academics”.
“It's when we engage in these wellbeing strategies and we bring them into our teacher pedagogy, where a more effective teachers, so the students do better academically,” she said.
“We have a lot of our teachers saying that it's been refreshing for them in terms of their own classroom practices, that the way they teach, not just what they teach, but the way they teach pedagogy that they use is refreshed and expanded as well.”
‘A beautiful upward spiral’
Professor Waters said the qualitative research done into the approach’s effectiveness has found that over time, there is “a beautiful upward spiral”.
“We don't go directly to the students; we work with all of the staff, and in a distributed learning model over time,” she said.
“Visible Wellbeing equips the staff with wellbeing strategies to utilise, first with themselves and their colleagues and their families, and then to find flexible ways to bring them to the students in class or co-curricular or whatever it happens to be, and the upward spiral.”
While working with three state schools that were using this approach, Professor Waters and her team found that because they were running Visible Wellbeing on a whole-of-school level, it gave them language, license and legitimacy.
“So, suddenly, putting time and effort into wellbeing strategies was very legitimised in the school, and they were given license to do it, training to do it, and also had the language for it,” she said.
“As they started to practice those strategies in the classroom, they were they were finding that their teaching was becoming more effective because they were able to better manage classroom behaviour and have that more personal connection with students.”
Professor Waters noted that as their teaching became more effective, the feedback loop was that it fed into their wellbeing.
“So, we gave them the strategies, which boosted their wellbeing. This made them better teachers, and then because they became better teachers, it boosted their sense of meaning and confidence and wellbeing,” she said.
“From that point, it just kind of spiralled up over the course of the year. And what we also found over the course of the year was that it very much started within their own classrooms, and then it spilled over into the staff room, and then into the whole school.”