Carey Baptist Grammar School reflects on what a year-long wellbeing pilot revealed about data-informed student support.
When My Mind Check ceased operation in December 2025, it marked the end of a nationally funded digital wellbeing platform that reached more than 20,000 students in just over a year. For Carey Baptist Grammar School in Melbourne, the timing coincided with the conclusion of a deliberately limited pilot – one that has left a clear imprint on how the school thinks about student voice, data and early intervention.
Carey, one of Victoria’s largest independent schools, serves more than 2,500 students from early learning to Year 12 across its Kew and Donvale campuses. Its wellbeing framework has long combined psychologists, pastoral structures and surveys designed to track student experience over time. My Mind Check was introduced in 2025 as an additional, tightly scoped layer within that system.
Head of Student Wellbeing Mr Allan Griffin first encountered the platform at an education conference, before its national rollout. Unlike many survey tools already in use, My Mind Check offered short, supervised check-ins that produced identifiable student responses rather than anonymous cohort data.
“It encapsulated what we were looking for,” Mr Griffin said. “Evidence-backed, well supported on the backend, and free – it ticked a lot of boxes”.
The platform was deployed only with Year 5 and Year 10 students – Carey’s largest intake and transition years – and administered twice during the year, in Term 1 and Term 3. Sessions were embedded into existing pastoral or class time, with staff present and consent obtained from families.
The aim was not to replace clinical assessment or long-established surveys, but to create an additional moment for students to articulate how they were feeling, in real time, and to give teachers clearer starting points for follow-up conversations.
My Mind Check itself was designed as an early-intervention tool. In 10–15 minutes, students responded to evidence-based prompts capturing indicators such as stress, anxiety and low mood. Educators accessed results through a portal that linked responses to curated resources and suggested next steps. Nationally, more than 200 schools across all sectors adopted the platform, supported by Australian Government funding that began in 2023. That funding will not continue, with operations ending in December 2025.
At Carey, the identifiable nature of the data proved to be the platform’s most distinctive feature. While anonymised surveys such as the Resilient Youth Survey continued to inform whole-school trends, My Mind Check provided insight into individual students “in that moment in time,” Mr Griffin explained.
This distinction shaped how the data was used. On check-in days, Carey convened psychologists and year-level leaders to review responses and quickly allocate responsibility for follow-up. In some cases, the information confirmed what teachers already suspected; in others, it provided reassurance that existing supports were aligned with student experience.
“It hasn’t necessarily told us anything teachers didn’t already know – and that’s a good thing,” Mr Griffin said. “Sometimes a wellbeing tool’s biggest job is to affirm teacher judgement and give shared language for families”.
Consent rates sat at around two-thirds of eligible students, typical for a pilot wellbeing initiative. Mr Griffin noted that any consent-based tool inevitably reflects only part of a student population, reinforcing the need for professional judgement and ongoing observation beyond survey data alone.
National data released in late 2025 showed strong engagement during the platform’s brief lifespan, with more than 29,000 check-ins completed and high levels of staff confidence reported. For Carey, the end of My Mind Check does not represent the loss of a single tool, but the conclusion of a trial that clarified where digital check-ins sit within a broader wellbeing ecosystem.
“Schools have ownership over how they use tools like this – and that’s the point. If we can use data to help a student feel safe enough to speak up tomorrow, that’s a win worth repeating,” Mr Griffin said.
