[On-screen text: David Orlandi — Principal – The Basin Primary School]
David: The Basin Primary School is a very close-knit community with most of our families being very local to our school. We have got 585 students and 65 staff. We are located at the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges on outer east of Melbourne. We have a range of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds with a range of mental health requirements. We have been able to employ Colin Hartley as our MHWL this year. We felt that it was best that we had someone that was known to our school community as we were developing that role.
[On-screen text: Colin Hartley — Mental Health and Wellbeing Leader, The Basin Primary School]
Colin: My job in the mental health and wellbeing space is really to increase the capacity of our teachers to be able to deal with students and their needs. After being here for so many years you can kind of see the changes within our students and to be able to have this role and to have something that really is providing that clear drive and need for it is something that is really exciting moving forward.
David: Colin is part of leadership and works with the leadership team carefully to plan and craft what the program will look like now and into the future. We are finding that as Colin completes more training, the role continues to evolve.
Colin: It's been really good to have the time that is dedicated to the MHWL training. I'm also one of the current performing arts teachers, and I teach the five, six students, which really does allow me to have relationships with the students still, but also with our families, with our community, with our staff. Because I've been here for such a long time, you really do build those connections and within the role of an MHWL, you're really able to draw on those connections.
David: The MHWL role is in its first year of implementation. From the very start, we engaged our mental health branch to come into the school and to meet with leadership team to gain an understanding of what the role would look like, and then also utilise the supports available from them to ensure that we are meeting the needs of our students and families at the school. Colin has worked with leadership to look at data sets from our AToSS data to be able to develop action plans for individual groups of students. One example is some work we are going to be doing with our grade four students around our responses to bullying.
Colin: Throughout the whole entire process of implementing this role, leadership have been there 100% for me, really giving me the dedicated time to allow me to kind of process the information, but then once I've processed it and I understand it a little bit, really using them to create the conversations and what strategies we need to put in place moving forward. One of the key takeaways that I would have from the implementation phase is really building that network with other people. I've been lucky enough to connect with two other MHWLs that sit within the same kind of dynamic and space that we have here, and to be able to share ideas, to be able to share resources and just talk about different concepts and different ideas with each other really helps you just have a clearer idea of what you can do. One of my pieces of advice would be really take the time to do the training, take the time to set it up properly. Take the time to really know the community that you're working in, and if you've been in the school for a really long time, use that time to evaluate, use that time to reflect on what already exists and really come at it with a clear approach.
David: I hope that Colin's role will see mental health being an important part of our community's vocabulary and that they will be able to see the students supported to have positive mental health outcomes at all times.
Colin: It's something that can really can make a difference and make a difference to make teachers feel more comfortable in identifying and working out strategies around mental health for our students, and I think it's really important that we take the time to create spaces where kids feel safe, and we have students that want to come to school and want to be around other people, and really just building that connectiveness is really important too.
[End of Transcript]
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