3. Focus Areas
To help Australia achieve the cultural shift towards an optimal child mental health and wellbeing system, the following sections outline key objectives and actions under four focus areas.
To help Australia achieve the cultural shift towards an optimal child mental health and wellbeing system, the following sections outline key objectives and actions under four focus areas.
- 1. Family and Community
- 2. The Service System
- 3. Education Settings
- 4. Evidence and Evaluation
Each focus area consists of a number of objectives that need to be achieved for a strong system for child mental health and wellbeing. For each objective, we have included a section focused on examples of where things are currently working well – ‘what we can build on’. These are not intended to be an exhaustive overview of all the positive work in a particular area, but rather to provide insights into what is already being done and how the Strategy might build on them.
It’s also important to note that the order in which the focus areas and associated actions are presented in this Strategy is not indicative of their priority for attention or implementation. In fact, many of the proposed actions would need to be implemented concurrently as they are dependent on each other. These following sections should be read with this in mind.
Objectives collectively span all aspects of a child’s experiences of mental health, from promoting wellbeing and identifying children who are struggling through to providing evidence-based care and feedback and evaluation (see Figure 3).
For each recommended action, we have suggested which level of government or sector is primarily responsible in the Summary of Actions section. This is not intended to feed into the territorial silos that are problematic, as many of the actions will require significant involvement across sectors, jurisdictions and governmental portfolios.
Each focus area has a number of proposed indicators of change. The purpose of these is explained further in chapter 4 on implementation.
Why the educational context is so important.
Education settings provide an ideal environment to build resilience, support and empower parents and carers, and identify and intervene early in emerging mental health issues. Especially because they are a relatively universal, nonstigmatising environment where children can be observed for long periods in multiple contexts.
Education settings are already providing support in many cases. Data from the Young Minds Matter survey (the second Australian Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing) indicate that teachers and other staff provide nearly 20% of students with informal support for behavioural and emotional problems, with staff members suggesting that additional help was needed in around 40% of cases. In addition, 11.5% of students have used a school-based service for support in the last 12 months, with 22.6% who used a health service having been referred by the school.
