Kids Helpline @ School

Program description

Kids Helpline @ High School is an early intervention and prevention program that promotes mental health education using video conferencing. The program aims to increase students' mental health literacy, resilience, and help-seeking skills. Sessions are planned in collaboration with teachers and the program is facilitated by qualified counsellors. Sessions are curriculum-aligned, interactive and engaging. Topics include:

• Help-seeking
• Resilience
• Emotional literacy and regulation
• Mental health literacy
• Online safety
• Digital wellbeing
• Respectful relationships
• Climate change
• Anti-bullying and conflict resolution

Intended outcomes

• Improved mental health literacy, digital citizenship, and help-seeking behaviours by learning directly from a qualified Kids Helpline counsellor
• Decreased barriers to help-seeking by through direct student connection to Kids Helpline’s support service
• Increased awareness that others experience similar issues
• Informed discussion of issues in class and with friends and family
• Increased teacher confidence and ability to respond to student issues
• Increased student ability to self-manage issues, be more supportive of each other, and stay safe
• Increased student access to support
• Improved social, emotional, and psychological health and wellbeing

Program details

Implementation considerations

• Target population: Primary and secondary school students.
• Program adaptability: The program is suitable for diverse cohorts including:
  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students
  • asylum seeker and refugee students
  • culturally and linguistically diverse students
  • LGBTIQA+ students
  • neurodivergent students
  • students with a disability.
• Staffing: The program is designed to run with a classroom of students, teachers often will participate within the session with their classroom or grade and therefore backfilling should not be needed.
• Training requirements: No training required. Schools will need to provide a working laptop with a webcam, video conferencing software (e.g. Microsoft Teams) and a projector to successfully implement the program.
• Factors to consider: The program is designed to run with a class of students. There is no minimum number of participants to ensure yourtown can still deliver services to rural/remote schools who may have small class sizes. Time commitments for teachers include booking sessions and participating in one x 30-minute pre-session consult per session. The sessions themselves run between 30 and 60 minutes, with both students and teachers present.
• Australian context: The program has been developed and delivered in Australia.

Cost

Minimum cost: Kids Helpline @ School sessions are free to schools.