Schools Are Investing More in Wellbeing Than Ever. Here's What's Missing.

Over the past decade, schools have invested more heavily in student wellbeing than ever before. Governments have expanded mental health funding, principals have redirected budgets, and entire industries have emerged to support schools in this space. 

And yet, youth mental health statistics continue to trend in the wrong direction. That contradiction raises the uncomfortable possibility that we’ve gone all-in on programs without first building the broader infrastructure to reap the benefits from them. 

Many schools have wellbeing programs. Far fewer have a genuinely robust wellbeing system. And importantly, very few schools have successfully married together all three tiers of support: Tier 1 whole-school prevention and culture, Tier 2 targeted early intervention, and Tier 3 individualised and intensive support. Think of it like a garden. Tier 1 is the soil and climate conditions, the foundation that determines whether anything can grow at all. Tier 2 is the recognition that different plants have different needs, that some require specific fertilisers. Tier 3 is the intensive care for the ones in genuine distress, the plants that need specialist intervention to survive and recover.

If we look at examples of heralded schools and programs, we may be quick to identify: 

• A flagship wellbeing school internationally recognised for its Tier 1 Positive Education framework

• A widely recognised and frequently purchased off-the-shelf national resilience program

• A trauma-informed cultural model with outstanding shared language and cultural practices.

The Problem With Programs

When a school identifies a wellbeing concern, the natural instinct is to look for a program. That makes sense. Programs are tangible. They have names, evidence bases, implementation manuals and clear price tags. They give leadership teams something concrete to discuss and something visible to point toward.

But a program is not a system. And a collection of programs still is not a system.

Take The Resilience Project, arguably one of the most recognisable wellbeing initiatives in Australian schools. A large independent evaluation conducted by Monash University followed more than 40,000 secondary students across 102 schools. Students in participating schools showed significantly lower odds of anxiety and depression compared to students in non-participating schools.

But the most interesting finding sat slightly underneath the headline. The strongest outcomes occurred in schools that had implemented the approach consistently for six or more years. Whereas, schools that implemented it for 4 years had non-significant gains in most wellbeing domains. 

That is probably not a weakness of The Resilience Project, but rather the point of this article.

The program appears to work best when a school has the leadership commitment, cultural consistency and workforce alignment to sustain it over time. The program needs architecture around it. And universal Tier 1 approaches still need clear pathways into Tier 2 and Tier 3 support for students who require more than a shared wellbeing curriculum can provide.

Even Great Schools Have Weaknesses

The same pattern shows up across some of Australia's most well-known wellbeing schools.

Geelong Grammar School (GGS) is often viewed as Australia's flagship Positive Education school. Its strength is obvious. The model gives schools a shared language around flourishing and embeds wellbeing into classroom conversations, staff interactions and school culture. At its best, it creates a genuinely coherent Tier 1 approach where wellbeing is woven into everyday life rather than bolted on as a formulaic wellbeing classroom lesson.

But despite training many other schools in Positive Education, leaders at GGS have spoken publicly about their challenges with fidelity in staff adoption. They found a U-shaped pattern of staff engagement and adoption. Some staff deeply embedded the approach, whilst others resisted it entirely. Even with exceptional program design, school leaders also have to face the challenge of implementing it with humans with varied belief systems. That is not a criticism of Positive Education, but rather an illustration of how difficult it can be to truly have a whole-school approach adopted and embedded. 

Then there is MacKillop Education, where I evaluated a twelve-month intervention using the trauma-informed ReLATE model. The findings, published in The Educational and Developmental Psychologist, showed significant reductions in conduct problems, hyperactivity and overall difficulties, with benefits extending beyond school into home life, peer relationships and family functioning.

In many ways, MacKillop had what most schools are trying to build. Every adult in the building shared the same trauma-informed language and response framework. This was not a one-off professional development session sitting forgotten in a staff portal. It shaped how staff responded to escalation, conflict, dysregulation, and relationship repair every single day. When a student became distressed, the response was predictable and consistent regardless of which adult they encountered. The school also used data exceptionally well. Students and teachers completed wellbeing questionnaires twice yearly, which informed decisions about who required more intensive support. 

Tier 3 supports were also unparalleled by other schools, with time allotted for individualised work with students and clinical staff frequently working with students and teachers. 

But MacKillop faced a similar challenge to GGS. The bolder the coherence of what you stand for in wellbeing culture, the more divisive it becomes. In my time at MacKillop Education, I witnessed several staff begin and finish their role within a week because of a clash with personal values.  

Again, this is not a criticism as these schools are rightly celebrated for their innovative approaches. Rather, it is another illustration of the reality of school wellbeing work: marrying all three tiers together can be exceptionally difficult.

A school can be strong at Tier 1 and completely under-resourced in Tier 3. A school can have a gun psychologist and still rely too heavily on crisis response due to issues in Tier 1 and 2. A school can have great programs and still lack the systems to sustain them. 

No school is perfect, but understanding the essential marriage of the tiers of the system is critical to keep making progress.

The Workforce Problem Sitting Underneath Everything

One of my great mentors once said something that has stayed with me: "A good psychologist in a school can have just as much influence as an assistant principal."

Not because psychologists should replace educational leadership, but because the skill set psychologists bring is deeply aligned with the challenges schools are now facing. Collecting and interpreting wellbeing data, identifying emerging concerns early, selecting and evaluating evidence-based interventions, supporting workforce capability, and navigating increasingly complex mental health presentations. 

Take, for example, the fact that many readers will be implementing The Resilience Project and allocating their budget to it as a wellbeing solution. I’d wager that few would know, the research indicates a 6-year commitment to achieve significant benefit, and the evidence for efficacy in primary schools is far less robust. Yet, psychologists are trained to evaluate research and are well placed to inform school leaders on program selection and budget allocation.

Yet, having a psychologist in your school is difficult when workforce ratios are stretched beyond capacity. Australia currently operates at approximately one school psychologist for every 2,031 students on a full-time equivalent basis. The recommended ratio sits at 1:500. At four times the recommended caseload, psychologists inevitably become overwhelmed by crisis response. System-level work becomes a luxury. Schools lean more heavily on standalone programs to fill the gap, while the deeper architecture needed for sustained change never fully develops.

The Royal Commission into Victoria's Mental Health System identified this challenge clearly, highlighting that the system remains slow to respond to the mental health needs of children under 12, with families often facing long wait times and fragmented support pathways. Schools did not create that problem. But increasingly, they are being asked to hold it.

Know What Your Garden (Wellbeing System) Needs

Despite the best intentions of decision makers, the quality of their wellbeing system is hard to determine. And to be honest, whilst I can decode systemic approaches in schools, I haven't the slightest idea of the levers I need to pull to keep the plants in my own garden flourishing.

That is part of the reason we developed the Psychs in Schools Wellbeing Systems Scorecard. Drawing on the Royal Commission, the World Health Organisation Health Promoting Schools model, and OECD system-level wellbeing research, it assesses ten domains of system maturity, including governance and strategic commitment, tiered models of support, workforce capability, data-informed decision-making and sustainability.

The Scorecard is a short, structured reflection that helps schools identify where their system is genuinely strong and where the foundations may need strengthening before cracks begin to appear.

You can complete the Wellbeing Systems Scorecard at psychsinschools.com/wellbeing-scorecard.

Rather than aiming for perfection, school leaders can be empowered to identify one aspect of their system at a time to improve. If you find you’re looking to be more data-informed in program selection, you can find evidence-based programs through sources like the Victorian Schools Mental Health Menu and the BeYou Programs Directory.

A wellbeing program seed can only grow as well as the soil system it is planted into. The good news is that we have more investment than ever to build a thriving garden that does more than produce short-term growth. We now have the opportunity to build the conditions for wellbeing to take root deeply, spread consistently, and endure long after the original gardeners have moved on.