About National Check-in Week
This event, and the team behind it, were born out of the heart of a social entrepreneur with a mission to reach all children regardless of socio-economic background. For more than a decade, this team has worked hand in hand with Principals, teachers, and students to provide tools, resources and support for continuous reporting of students’ emotional wellbeing and a continuing evidence base of what works for school communities. After the past two years, it has become evident that we need to do more. And thus, “National Check-in Week” was conceived!
How do we know how our students are TRULY feeling?
What is National Check-in Week?
Great Question! This is a real passion project for our team to help start important conversations and focus on the emotional needs of students. Through connection, conversation, and continuous check-ins, we can help students better understand, regulate and communicate their emotions and relationships in a positive, healthy way. Students have experienced huge disruptions over the past two years. Now, more than ever, it is important to connect with our students, learn how they feel, and provide the support and skills they need to thrive throughout their lives. Together we will help start important conversations and focus on the emotional needs of students.
Parents, educators, carers, and communities can be empowered to track and positively respond to students’ emotional needs to promote wellbeing and learning.
And it all starts with us.
Why do we need a National Check-in Week?
To bring focus to the wellbeing needs of every child, every day.
To provide educators a tool to start conversations today that will provide timely data to help understand students’ state of wellbeing, rather than have to wait on annual surveys.
There is a better way.
A report showed that calls to Kids HelpLine during the height of the pandemic in Australia were primarily due to mental health concerns. Whilst 5–9 year olds are a smaller cohort of users of the Kids Helpline service, responses to that age group have increased by more than 80% over the past 12 months compared with the same period last year. (yourtown & Australian Human Rights Commission, 2020)
…the most important finding was that their relatively poor social and emotional skills had a strong detrimental effect on a number of important academic, work and life outcomes. (OECD report)
“We’ve got massive amounts of anxiety in our students. From physical behaviour, oppositional behaviours, kids not wanting to come to school. They’re melting down at school. We’ve got a lot of, and I’m only a primary school. So, I have no idea how the high schools are handling it. We’ve got lot of self-harm and threatening self-harm and parent anxiety.”
– Lauren, school leader,
school 6, major city, mid ICSEA [source]
