Dr Ben Lohmeyer, from the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work at Flinders University, is leading a two-year project that will include schools across Adelaide.
As debates continue in Australia on the merits of national strategies for keeping students safe, such as school bullying policy and social media bans, experts at Flinders University are leading a project creating Trauma Aware School Villages – a new model aimed at tackling childhood trauma in schools.
Children with complex trauma are likely to be in most classrooms in most Australian schools, with an estimated one-third of Australian children having been exposed to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse.
Complex childhood trauma and maltreatment have a hugely negative impact on children’s development, with impacts on their mental health and education. To illustrate the scale of this impact, the Blue Knot Foundation has estimated the hefty economic burden of childhood trauma on Government services. If traumatised children were to achieve the same life outcomes of non-traumatised adults, the Foundation estimates this would reduce the financial burden on Australian governments by as much as $24 billion annually.
To tackle this growing need, the Trauma Aware School Village project will take a preventative, whole-of-school community approach where children, caregivers, educators, and researchers will work together to find solutions that prevent address childhood trauma in schools.
Together we will co-design develop, deliver and assess the impact of the Trauma Aware School Village in supporting emotional regulation, safety, and connection in schools by co-designing assessments, treatments, and preventions.
An important innovation of this project is an emphasis on parent and student voice. Equipping educators with trauma informed practices is important but misses the other key members of the school community. This project works with co-design student and parent groups throughout the implementation, as well as having experiential learning for students and parents to support them to create trauma aware spaces in the classroom and at home.
The Trauma Aware School Village will assess the impact of a co-designed intervention with an emphasis on the students’ and parents’ experiences. The intervention includes experiential trauma-aware education for students, trauma-informed professional development for educators, individualised therapeutic support for students and educators, and trauma aware resources for caregivers.
The experiential approach utilises art and adventure-based methods to teach students emotional self-regulation skills and then provide an opportunity to put them into practice in a safe space. Created by Connected Self Wellbeing Services, this program is called Adventure to Thrive and is designed to be fun and create shared language, skills and experience in the classroom to tackle life’s challenges. The School Village approach ensures these skills and language are then shared across the school and home.
The project is funded by the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) and is a collaboration between Flinders University, Connected Self Wellbeing Services and four primary schools in Adelaide, as well as experts from Swinburne University of Technology, Charles Sturt University, and the University of Tasmania.
The model will help us to shape evidence-based practice guidelines for implementing trauma informed practices in Australian schools that aims to reduce the impact of trauma on children’s mental health through a school village approach.
Programs delivered in schools have the potential to address and prevent childhood trauma, but there is limited evidence of the effectiveness of this approach that accounts for the unique context of Australian Schools.
Add to this, there is virtually no evidence of the importance of engaging children and caregivers as collaborators in through codesign or of proving them with trauma education through a community approach.
The ultimate hope is that we can create a way to change individual behaviour and support school systems to improve emotional self-regulation, safety in the classroom, and to promote a sense of connection between students, educators and caregivers in school.
The new research project, Trauma Aware School Village: Tackling Childhood Trauma In Schools, has received $999,614.42 as part of the latest grants awarded by the MRFF. The project will start in 2025 and run for two years and will include schools across Adelaide.
