The Guardian
The commitment will offer an average of $20,000 per school for the year depending on need and size. It also includes $10.8 million for a “voluntary mental health check tool”.
States and territories will manage the program, which includes “student wellbeing officers” or chaplains being placed at schools to help students through pastoral care and other services such as excursions, volunteering activities and workshops.
All state and federal education ministers have in addition signed a five-year $307.18m funding agreement to fund the program into the future.
The education minister, Jason Clare, said Covid lockdowns had a “massive impact” on the mental health of students.
Good mental health and wellbeing have a significant impact on young people’s engagement with education and their learning outcomes.
This is particularly important as students return to regular face-to-face classroom learning after two years of disruption due to Covid-19.
In January, the Australian Psychological Society (APS) urged the federal government to commit to urgently funding more mental health and psychological response services in the next budget after a Climate Council survey found climate disasters had a bleak impact on the mental health of Australians.
Conducted in December 2022, the Climate Council survey of 2,032 Australians found since 2019, 80% of those surveyed reported they had experienced an extreme weather event such as heatwaves, flooding, and bushfires and half said their mental health had been detrimentally affected by the extreme weather event they experienced.
APS president Dr Catriona Davis-McCabe said young Australians were “deeply concerned, and at times overwhelmed” by uncertainty associated with the climate crisis.