Be You: A national education initiative to support the mental health of Australian children and young people

Abstract

Early learning services and schools provide unique settings for mental health promotion and early intervention due to the potential for population-level dosage and reach in terms of reducing multiple risk factors and enabling protective factors among young people. Educators play a key role in supporting children and young people’s experiences of, and access to mental health promotion opportunities, and hold unparalleled opportunity in terms of creating mental health–promoting learning environments. In 2018, the Australian National Mental Health in Education Initiative, Be You, was launched. Be You is a multi-million-dollar Australian government–supported initiative, freely available to all 24,000 early learning services, primary and secondary schools throughout Australia. The potential for subsequent population reach is proposed to potentially exceed that of any mental health promotion initiative for children and young people previously observed in Australia. Be You aims to foster mentally healthy learning communities across Australia through building capacity among educators to embed mental health promotion strategies. The Initiative was developed based on a review and integration of previous national mental health promotion frameworks, with an overall alignment to existing state and territory education, social and emotional well-being frameworks, and the Australian Curriculum. In delivering facilitated support from specialised consultants to early learning services and schools participating in the initiative, Be You draws on professional learning principles designed to build capacity in educators and educational systems relating to mental health promotion. It uses an updated, multi-module online platform providing interactive, evidence-based resources. This paper presents the Be You framework, describes the evidence sources used to inform the underlying principles and objectives, discusses the specific components that form the initiative, details the professional learning modules and content, and discusses potential implications for population mental health and prevention efforts.

The state of psychiatric research in the Asia Pacific region

“…Australia is a pioneer in youth mental health research and service delivery. Recent areas of research include the evaluation of school based initiatives (Hart, Cropper, Morgan, Kelly, & Jorm, 2020; Hoare et al, 2020), the use of technology (Byrne, Kotze, Ramos, Casties, & Harris, 2020), and access to care (Chatterton et al, 2019; Schnyder et al, 2020). The expansion of clinical services designed for youth (eg, Headspace Centers) and system changes have resulted in the establishment of large datasets to facilitate a transdiagnostic approach in understanding the development of mental illness in young people (Cross & Hickie, 2017; Lavoie et al, 2020).…”

The effect of adverse and positive experiences on inflammatory markers in Australian and UK children

“…Aligning with the bioecological model ( Bronfenbrenner and Evans, 2000 ; Bronfenbrenner and Ceci, 1994 ) both adverse and positive experience should be targeted with multi-collaborations between families, schools and communities. For example, strengths-based mental health initiatives such as Within My Reach in the USA and Be You in Australia have multi-sector collaborations and engagement with families, schools, communities, and health systems that aim to target both adverse experiences and positive experiences, and have shown promising results ( Sterrett-Hong et al, 2018 ; Hoare et al, 2020 ).…”

An International Review to Characterize the Role, Responsibilities, and Optimal Setting for Health Literacy Mediators

“… 61 , 71 Indeed, as shown in Table 3 , many of the studies did provide HL education during the childhood years, with a median age of 10 years. For example, Aghazadeh et al, 29 Hoare et al 42 and Wright et al 56 recommended that HL should be developed concurrently with childhood health behaviors. In contrast, papers by Bruselius-Jensen et al, 33 Greenberg et al 39 and Hughes and Maiden 43 suggest that adolescence is an appropriate life stage to implement HL education, as this is a key transition period into adulthood.…”

“…Schools promote learning and children spend a significant amount of time there. 34 , 36 , 42 , 45 Schools also have the potential to reach many children in the population irrespective of external factors such as socioeconomic status. 61 , 71 This promotes an equitable and universal approach to facilitating HL development.…”

“…29,36,37,43,46 This finding of no significant change is supported by others, stating that knowledge alone will not lead to a change in behavior. [62][63][64] To change others' behaviors, a HLM must be capable of promoting knowledge acquisition to enable individuals to autonomously 40 Classes in motion Teachers Habib-Mourad et al 41 Health-E-PALS intervention Teachers Hoare et al 42 Be make health-promoting decisions. A HLM with these attributes will be important in reducing the incidence of NCD and addressing the inequity perpetuated by inadequate HL that exists.…”