Unpacking ‘empowerment’ and growing a shared definition

Geri Sumpter

Good morning and welcome to our Be You Virtual Conference, Empowerment: Keys to Mentally Healthy Communities. My name is Geri Sumpter, and I have the absolute privilege of being the head of Be You Delivery at Beyond Blue. So that means that I'm responsible for creating the best experience from Be You, and helping early learning services and schools to create mentally healthy learning communities.

The conference that we are in is today is going to be all talking about empowerment and about resilience. And the first session that we're in is all about unpacking empowerment and growing that shared definition. So very pleased to be here with you all today.

The conference itself has got 13 sessions over the two days. And you're going to hear from some absolutely fantastic people. You're going to be hearing from some subject matter experts. You're going to be hearing from our Be You workforce. And you going to be hearing from some educators, so really helping to understand how to use Be You to help you to create those mentally healthy learning communities.

I'm very pleased now to handover to Woi Wurrung Elder Perry Wandin for our Welcome to Country. And it's the Geri and Perry show today. So welcome Perry.

Perry Wandin

Thank you Geri, good morning everybody. Wominjeka, welcome. My name's Perry Wandin. As you heard, I'm a Wurundjeri Woi Worrung Elder and I'm very proud to Be You and Beyond Blue for letting me do you a Welcome to Country. 

With my story, I'm very proud to say that Wiliam Barak, who last week we were able to get back on a beautiful bid in New York, a painting of his, that was given gifted to the de Pury family in the Yarra Valley. And it ended up in France and then it ended up in America by one of the family members trying to sell it off. And with that history with Wiliam Barak, he alone in Victoria here with kind admission was able to set up negotiations for people but –

The one thing I should say, sorry I didn't do, is I'd like to pay respects to all my ancestors, Elders both past present. And of course the next generation, emerging, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

But as I was saying Wiliam Barak. We're very proud because Wiliam Barak is my great, great, great uncle. Wiliam Barak, as I said, was able to talk to the Government in so many different ways, but, he tried very hard as a role model because he was our last full blood Ngurungaeta.

When Wiliam Barak passed away in 1903, it passed on to my great-grandfather Robert Wandoon. And that's where the Wandin line come into it. They changed the name with W A N D double O N to, W A N D I N, which it is today. And the local town in Yarra Valley was named after my great-grandfather. So we're very, very, very much part of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung. We're also known as the Yarra tribe. And we'll hopefully in time that we might be able to get the both connected together. 

Today with Wurundjeri, we've been going since 1986. And we have been a main instigator in trying to get the cultural heritage management plans in Melbourne and around Victoria, to be able to understand what cultural heritage is all about. Stone artifacts and the story of Scar Trees and so forth. It's very important for our people. Not only our people but everybody in Victoria and all around Australia for- to understand why stone artifacts are such a life as we are today with knives, forks and the blades that we used back then. 

Talking about Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung back in the Coranderrk Mission days. It was a sad sight. Many young people were dying and the elderly, and of course, that lovely word of genocide was happening too. So, it's not a very comfortable thing to say, but it has to be put out there.

There were six other missions in Victoria and the same thing was virtually happening to them as well. Today, well, like I said, we're very proud to be able to stand here and, well, I am, because my great, great, great uncle what he has put to the Government. And we're doing the same thing today, fighting for our rights, to be able to say that word because in 1967 with the referendum Aboriginal people being able to vote. It was a very next step.

My mother's side was English. So, I have got a bit of a gripe, but I, I don't take that to heart because my mother was very, very much behind my father and the way he was because he was our last Ngurungaeta. He's been passed now for 17 years. And he was the very first Aboriginal player to play for that mighty team St Kilda back in VFL days in 1952, 53. And I'm very proud of that because we, as a family, have been very staunch St Kilda supporters and maybe, touch wood, we might have something this year.

With Aboriginal People today, as I was saying about the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, we're very, very, very staunch in our RAP status with our area and with the Government backing us the other week with 500,000 to acquire the painting of Wiliam Barak, who, which was of women dancing in their cloaks for a Ceremony, which is very good because ceremonies now, as we know, no longer exist only in Tanderrums, which, and initiations.

So the one thing is we got that back and for being over the 200 year mark it is something that we've always wanted and we've been able to.

So I'd really like to thank everybody at Beyond Blue for letting me be able to do this and to everybody out there, I hope you have a great day. In our Woi Wurrung language, Wominjeka, yearmann koondee biik Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung balluk. Meaning Welcome to the Land of Wurundjeri People. And I do welcome you. And I thank you very much on behalf of my people. Thank you.

Geri Sumpter

That was absolutely fantastic. And thank you so much Perry, it's really great to hear your reflections. And it's also great to think about reconciliation on the back of National Reconciliation Week, which was last week, which is all about being brave and making change and taking those daily actions to tackle that unfinished business of reconciliation. It's also great thinking about reconciliation in terms of our new Prime Minister. And that's that promise to take action on the Uluru statement from the heart. And I think that's something that is going to resonate really well and go further towards reconciliation in Australia.

I would also welcome everybody to put their own Acknowledgements of Country in the chat today, if you'd like to do so. And talking of Prime Ministers, I'd like to now introduce someone very special to us here at Be You. She's the chair of Beyond Blue and she's also the former Prime Minister of Australia, the honourable Julia Gillard. So Julia would have loved to have been with us here today, but unfortunately the stars didn't align. So she has recorded a message for us. And here she is.

Hon. Julia Gillard

Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to say a few words on the opening day of Be You's Virtual Conference.

It's a real pleasure to join an event where two of my interests, education and mental health, come together. As many of you would know education has and continues to be one of my great policy passions.  I firmly believe a quality education is critical for the success and prosperity of each individual and our nation overall. I know I personally would not have been able to reach the office of Prime Minister of Australia without the benefit of great education.  I'm sure all conference attendees would agree that every child deserves the benefits that come through high quality learning. And I'm confident you would also agree that good education and strong mental health go hand in hand to build resilience and emotional literacy.

To see so many educators joining this discussion is testament to your dedication to the mental health and well-being of the future of our nation, Australia's children and young people. Ensuring the next generation have not just the best education opportunities but are able to learn in a supportive, inclusive and emotionally safe environment helps shape their future in the best possible way. 

But I acknowledge these last two years have been tough. You've had to contend with the continuing pressures of the pandemic, and some of you have also been affected by the impact of natural disasters like the devastating fires and floods we have seen. All of this adding to the disruption. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your service, your courage through adversity and your unwavering commitment to our children and young people. Beyond Blue is proud to stand with you and we hope Be You is supporting you. 

Since launching Be You in 2018, we have had nearly 12,500 early learning services and schools, and around 150,000 individual educators register. Independent research conducted for Be You this year found 80% of educators feel mental health is one of the biggest issues affecting young people and 94% believe good mental health is a prerequisite for learning. Be You's vision is to build an education system where every learning service and school in Australia is a positive, inclusive and resilient place, helping each child, young person, staff member and family achieve their best mental health. We know that three quarters of mental health problems emerge before the age of 25. Early intervention is vital and we're encouraged to see governments highlight the need for further investment in children and young people, but more needs to be done.

Governments must make bold policy decisions as they look to institute long overdue reform of our mental health and suicide prevention systems. We must get the detail right if we are to ensure that change is long lasting and meaningful. And part of that is ensuring governments work together to embed wellbeing in our education systems. Beyond Blue has four key policy areas we believe are vital for an integrated national approach that leaves no one behind.

The first is to ensure wellbeing outcomes are measured in a consistent, systematic way so that mental health is prioritised just like academic results. We think the best way to do this is by including wellbeing outcomes in the National Schools Reform Agreement. The second is putting mental health at the centre of the curriculum. This could be achieved through reforms to the national school curriculum and approved learning frameworks and updating teacher standards to better reflect wellbeing. Thirdly, we need increased government resourcing to provide schools and early learning services with the tailored Be You consult support they value, and ongoing funding for wellbeing co-ordinators or other specialist support staff to co-ordinate a whole of learning community approach. And finally, to properly equip educators, wellbeing needs to be included in all educator qualifications so everyone graduates with a similar level of understanding about mental health. 

Be You content has the potential to be adapted to be used by both trainers and people studying education. We've been working with the higher education sector to explore how this could be rolled out to ensure it is taught as a key part of education training. Research shows 60% of educators face time constraints as a barrier to supporting the mental health of children and young people. Juggling increasingly demanding workloads and responsibilities also impacts on their own wellbeing. That's why making sure educators have time for ongoing professional development is important. And this will require backfilling positions and more resourcing to ease their administrative workload.

These are ambitious goals but change doesn't happen by being timid. Right now, Australia is at a crossroads as we emerge from the pandemic with the ability to create something better than we had before. Now more than ever, reforming and enhancing mental health and education systems will be key to our social and economic recovery. It will help build the strength and resilience of future generations so that they can lead full and contributing lives and also ensure we support your vital professional contribution as nation builders.
We can seize this opportunity for generational change, and that will have long term benefits for children, young people and educators alike. I thank you all for the role you play in this important journey, and I hope you have a wonderful conference.

Geri Sumpter

Thank you, Julia. I think it's really great to hear what Julia has been talking to governments about. I think we can all agree there's some opportunities at that education system level to embed wellbeing into early learning services and schools. And it's really, as Julia said, is creating something better than we had before. And I think that sentence really resonated with me.

So as we go into this conference, I think it's good to know that people like Julia advocate for changes that will really support the work that we do. And as Julia also said, at the moment promoting wellbeing can often fall to certain individuals in early learning services and schools. And so Be You is really about empowering every single educator and education leader to support wellbeing. So it's a more holistic and sustainable approach. And the system level changes we're advocating for are about building wellbeing into structures to ensure it's properly prioritised and resourced in every early learning service and school in Australia. So let's continue on this journey together. And I think this topic really links into the conference and what we're talking about here today, which is all about empowerment. Because while we're working to empower children and young people, it's good to know there are also people like Julia who are working to support us.

Now as we do talk about mental health, it may bring up some experiences that are difficult for people. And I wanted to show you here a resource that we have in Be You that you can show in your early learning service or school. Which is really talking about mental health services and supports that you might need to reach out to. So if through the conference you find that you do experience some challenges, it may be good to just take a break. So stand up, have a stretch, go do something different for a little while and rejoin us. You might reach out to a trusted colleague or friend. Or you might be at a place where you want to reach out to one of the support services listed on that slide. And also the services that are listed in the chat. So you'll see this, the link to this graphic provided in our discussion forum box.

Now to give you a little bit of more context about what Be You actually is and what it can do for you. So Be You is a national mental health initiative for educators and also the organiser of this conference. It's delivered by Beyond Blue, in partnership with headspace and Early Childhood Australia. The objectives of the initiative are really to help educators to support the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people and their own mental health. And our vision is that every early learning community, every learning community is positive, inclusive and resilient, and a place where every child, young person, educator and family can achieve their best possible mental health. And it's also completely free. It's available to every educator, every early learning service and every school in Australia.

Our conference today, as we said, is all around empowerment and resilience. And resilience is a term that's taken on a new meaning in the past few years. But what does resilience really mean? How can we identify it and how can we create resilient learning communities? 

Well, empowerment is key. And without empowerment, there's no space for resilience to grow. So today at the Virtual Conference, we will be exploring what empowerment and resilience means to each of us. We'll be looking at those barriers and facilitators to empowerment, and we'll be looking at how empowerment impacts mental health and wellbeing. And tomorrow, on day two, it will really be getting into looking at the tools and resources that Be You can offer to help put some theory into action. And we'll be giving some good practical examples, facilitating empowering learning communities.

So each session today we'll address the perspectives of early learning, primary and secondary school settings. Whereas tomorrow's sessions are aimed at a learning stage. So early learning, primary or secondary school. So we're hoping that there's something for everybody to really resonate with over the course of the conference. 

The conference will be interactive. There'll be an opportunity to share and to learn from each other, which I think is what everybody enjoys doing. And your participation may be through some polls, it may be through our discussion forum, which is that chat function, to share your reflections, your thoughts or your ideas. And we really do welcome that. There's a Q and A function for any questions that you might have. And during the conference the Be You team, our moderators, will be responding to those questions in the Q and A function. And they may come through in some questions that we can have with some of our facilitators or some of our speakers throughout the conference. And they'll also be providing some links to resources that may respond to some of your Q and A as well in that discussion forum. We also have a Twitter handle. So that is #BeYouVirtual and we really encourage you to be active across our socials.

When you are providing some commentary, please remember to consider confidentiality, privacy and self care when sharing. And if you do have any IT problems, because we've all found over the past two years that they sometimes come along, the IT support phone number will be in the discussion forum box now. So you'll be able to see that there as and when you need it, and our team will be able to help you.

This conference is being recorded and all of the recordings are going to be there for future reference as you go through your Be You journey. They will be up on our Be You website in approximately four weeks time with some transcripts and also answers to any Q and A that you may put into the Q and A function today. You will be receiving a certificate of participation for joining us today and this will be emailed out to you after the event. And for those in New South Wales or the ACT, the conference is a New South Wales Education Standards Authority, that's NESA for short, and ACT Teacher Quality Institute, TQI for short, accredited event. And we're very proud of this accreditation. More information about what that accreditation means can be found at our conference web page. And that's also now linked in our discussion forum.

Okay. So now I have the absolute pleasure of introducing you to our keynote speaker, Professor Helen Milroy.

Helen Milroy, is a descendant of the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. She spent more than 25 years as a pioneer in child and Aboriginal mental health and recovery from grief and trauma. And Helen is Australia's first indigenous doctor. She is a very awarded individual. In 2018, she was the Australian Indigenous Doctor of the Year. In 2020, she was a joint winner of the Australian Mental Health Prize. And in 2021, she was the Australian of the Year for Western Australia. So we are very pleased to get some of professor Helen's time today.

She plays numerous roles on boards and mental health advisory committees, and she's also a Beyond Blue board director. Her research includes identifying barriers and facilitators to cultural and child trauma recovery. And frameworks to build resilience and empowerment. So we're very privileged to have her here today. And I would really like now to welcome Professor Helen Milroy. Thanks, Helen.

Prof. Helen Milroy

Always a bit of technical difficulty when you start doing these things, but just wanted to say hello to everyone. I'm very honoured to be here. I'm very buoyed by the comments that Julia Gillard made around what's going to be happening in terms of a policy space. And I really hope that that gets fully implemented as we go forward, because I think the ideas that she presented were absolutely fantastic and very much in line with what we'd like to achieve in this space.

So I'm going to talk to you today a little bit about mental health and children and the role of our schools and early educators, which is actually very close to my heart as well. Before I get started though, I'd just like to acknowledge that lovely Welcome to Country that we had this morning by Perry and just to remind us all that we're all standing on Aboriginal Land and where we're meeting today. And just pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I'm fortunate enough to be in the land of the Whadjuk Noongar people here in Perth. I'm very, very grateful that they took such great care of this country in order for me to be able to live and work and bring up my children here.

So just by way of introduction, this is my family. So this is my grandmother holding my mum, and this is me then holding my daughter. So I think when we really think about wellbeing, we have to take that generational perspective and understand that all of these things that have gone before us, within our families, very much impact on us today. And we heard some of the stories of the local people this morning already, and some of that generational trauma that we're still dealing with today and how that may impact on our children's wellbeing at school. So I think what we have to understand is that as my grandmother holds my mum, my mum holds me and I hold my children. And when we think about that as children get that little bit older and they start getting into society, then society is meant to hold our children as well.

And I think that it's an absolute privilege and an honour in a way that early educators in schools get to have our children for such long periods of time. Because what we're actually doing is we're handing over our children for you to hold them for us while we're not there. And we hope that they will be treated in the same way that we would treat our own families. And that's how we would view it from an Aboriginal perspective.

Okay. Sorry about that, everybody. So this was my family slide that I was just talking to about the holding. So my grandmother, my mum, and me and my child. And I'm expecting my first grandchild this year so I'm very excited that I'll have that next generation to also hold and nurture their wellbeing into the future.

So I think that I just wanted to talk a little bit about the importance of early educators and schools, and we've already laid down the fact that you will hold our children for long periods of time. So your ability to influence their development is significant. And so I think that's been even more recognised now, the high value that we place on schools and early educators. Your role is ever increasing as we already know. And that can both cause stress, but it can also be an opportunity to actually embed a greater level of wellbeing in early life. We also know that there's a lot of health and safety and wellbeing taught in schools and in early education centers. And that the building of social, emotional and life skills actually occurs during this period of time, particularly in the nought to twelves. This is often when we embed a lot of the skills that then give people and adults actually lifelong resilience. 

We also know that social and cultural and religious and moral values can also be part of education. We also know that this is a time when we can have early warning signs for kids who are going off track or need additional help. And in fact, when you think about mental health in particular, and I think Julia already mentioned this in her talk. Sometimes the early indicators of significant mental health problems can occur in early childhood. And this is where we should be picking them up. We shouldn't be waiting until they're much, much older and things are much, much worse and more difficult to treat. We should be getting in as earliest as we can and getting children's development back on track.

Schools and early education centers are also potentially a place of both sanctuary and harm. And so we always have to be hypervigilant when we're looking at what we do in these sorts of places that we make sure that they are actual places of sanctuary. And as far as we can manage, make sure that we minimise or reduce any sort of trauma that may result. Safe environment obviously is an essential prerequisite for both mental health and for learning in schools. And I think as we move forward, we also recognise that trauma informed responses are becoming much more important as we understand the issues and the experiences that our children have. 

So if we think about the roles or the multiplicity of roles, we know that you are role models in these sorts of areas, you're advocates, you're supporters, as well as educators. So you have a multiplicity of roles that you play both for our children, our families, but also our communities.

When I was involved in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, we were also very aware that schools play an incredible role in supporting children. And in fact, often people told us that it was a teacher or someone within the education system that actually helped them or that they would turn to if they were having a difficult situation. So I think we should not underestimate the difference that every single one of you can make in a child's life and in that family's life, as well as in the community. And if you think about generational trauma and generational recovery, then if you can turn around a child's life today, then that's going to also establish the wellbeing for future generations.

So we know that you guys are all experts in education and development of young children. Developmental perspectives here are absolutely critical. I can't overestimate that. It's absolutely essential that we understand not just how children physically grow, but how their mental health and their emotional and social wellbeing develops in those early years. We also know that there's no learning without mental health and wellbeing. So children are not well, from a mental health perspective, if they're not able to concentrate, if they're not able to feel settled, if they're not comfortable in the learning environment, then education is going to go out the window. So that ability to create that safe place from a mental health or a psychological perspective, as well as a cultural perspective is absolutely essential before learning can begin. And certainly for kids who come from that sort of trauma background, it's very, very difficult for them to feel settled. And it may be that there are other things that need to happen before the child can settle into a day of teaching.

We also know that sometimes education systems and teachers and schools and early educators and not sufficiently equipped, I don't believe, to handle the complexity and some of the trauma issues that children are presenting with today. And certainly in some of my work with some of the educators here in WA, that's been a significant call-out, that having sufficient resources to be able to actually understand all of the complexities of what's going on in the child and the family and community's life, can really invade into the school environment and disrupt learning. We also know that schooling and education has a significant influence and impact on brain development. And if we established social and emotional learning early in life then we build resilience over the whole lifespan.

So just a quick, very brief look at this understanding of brain development. We know that the ability for the brain to actually change in response to experiences is far more likely in the early years. And if you look at that graph, if you look at the green line, then we can see that up to about sort of the age of 10, there's a huge capacity to change. After that, it starts to level out. And when you're starting to get into sort of my age group, which is right at the other end of the spectrum, it's very difficult to actually change how the brain functions and its structure. We also know that the amount of effort for the brain to be able to change and get back on track gets much, much harder with age. And again, if we look at that sort of early year period, which is when all of the kids are in early education or in schools, then there's a greater capacity for change. 

So you guys have the absolute time in a person's life when you can make the most difference and get brain development. And that's both the structure of the brain, the way it actually grows and develops, as well as the way it functions. You have the capacity to get that back on track, early in life. And when we do that, we know that that will then be sustained over the lifespan, building resilience right into old age.

So if we think about the COVID pandemic and what's happened to us over the last couple of years, and I think I would see it as a global trauma. It's created a pervasive level of anxiety and uncertainty right across the world, but in particular, of course, in Australia and within our communities and our families. And so it's left us with changes in our feelings of sort of being able to be in control, our personal freedoms. A lot of families have suffered significant loss. And if it hasn't been direct loss, it's been that sort of sense of isolation and grief from not being able to see families. And this hasn't just impacted on a single family or a single child it's impacted on whole communities. In fact it's impacted on the whole of society.

And if we think about how we might understand what the impact of this sort of global level trauma is, then I see it as a triad of sort of powerlessness. So we've lost that ability to feel that we can control the situation. We've had that sort of sense of helplessness. Because of the direct impact on our own feelings, being in lockdown for long periods of time, not being able to go out and do the things that you would normally do. So having that very personal impact as well on whole families. And then the hopelessness, which is really about the sense of disconnection and loss that people experience. And certainly for children, that loss of ability to socialise with their friends and peers as they're growing up. For youth as well, similarly that inability to be able to just do what young people do and have that sort of socialisation and that peer support is quite significant. And so those feelings of grief and loss are quite significant, again, pervasive across society.

But not only has the global pandemic brought these issues into the forefront, and certainly brought mental health issues into the forefront, we also have to understand that this is on a background of rising mental health challenges for children and youth over the past 20 years. I'm not going to go into all of the data today because there's not enough time, but if we just look at a little bit of that data, then we can see that there are rapid rises in children and young people presenting for support in mental health services. Also presenting to emergency departments in regard to self-harm, suicide attempts and other sorts of levels of distress that have required a hospital admission. So we have to understand that it's not just the pandemic that's caused these problems. This is on a background of unmet need, and significant increasing distress and challenges over a 20-year period.

So if we think then about what we need to do in terms of the way forward out of the pandemic, and also then to think more broadly about where we need to go for mental health for children, then we can think about it, those three aspects of the powerlessness and the lack of control, the trauma and the helplessness that people experience and the loss and grief and disconnection and hopelessness that people experience. And we can also understand this from a transgenerational perspective for our Indigenous communities as well, because this hasn't just happened in this generation. It's happened since the beginning of colonisation. So that's probably 8 to 10 generations now as time moves on.

And if we think about then how we might go about addressing those things, we can address them, that triad of trauma, from both the personal, the family, as well as the community level. So if we were thinking about it in terms of a community, then the powerlessness would be addressed through things like self-determination and community governance. And allowing communities to be able to take back that sense of control and their own sense of destiny as well and that includes having that governance over their own families.

If we were looking at it from the personal perspective, that sort of helplessness side of it, then we would also look at rebuilding those cultural strengths, that restoration and that community resilience that we want.

And then of course, on the third part of the triangle to address the loss and disconnection. It's really about building strong, healthy community connections. Having those strong, healthy identities and developing a more healthy community life.

If we apply that same model to thinking about education and children, then we can do a similar sort of thing. So if we're going to address the issue of powerlessness for kids, then we need to look at empowerment across all age. And empowerment doesn't just have one aspect to it, but it is about giving pride of place for children within our adult world. So not assuming that we know what kids are worried about or not assuming that we know what they're going to tell us, but actually being able to listen and to empower that listening in a way where we not only listen but we also take notice of what kids are saying, and we help them to input into all of the things that we are doing in regard to school or education or mental health.

So this is about self-determination in action. It's about enhancing children's knowledge skills, right from very young children, even little kids can understand things. If it's presented in a way from that they can understand from their language levels and their developmental perspective. But enhancing knowledge skills with the right knowledge in regard to the pandemic, in regard to mental health, in regard to learning and allow them to develop that sort of understanding from their own perspective. 

I can remember one example of where a family was very worried that their child was very concerned about the health of their grandparents because of COVID. But in actual fact, when they asked the child personally, what he was worried about, he was actually more worried about whether the family pets were going to get COVID. So again, we, we can't assume we know what kids are going to tell us or what they're worried about. We actually have to take the time to listen to what their concerns are and then address that with the appropriate knowledge that we want them to have.

We need to build in much more problem solving. And one of the best ways to do that in early life, but even really across the lifespan, is imaginative play. Unless we have really good imagination skills in early childhood, and that imaginative play early in life, we don't develop the creative thinking and innovation that we want across the lifespan. And we know that if we want to have innovative and creative problem solving as adults, it starts with imagination in early childhood. And that creative thinking and innovation will be built throughout the lifespan if we do that. My concern about the early childhood environment is moving more towards literacy and numeracy, instead of actually really enhancing this imaginative play. And in their own way of learning in that, particularly around social and emotional learning early in life. 

We need to build in much more early autonomy and self-reliance. So instead of spoon feeding children, allow them to have experiences and learn for themselves and be able to make decisions as early as they can in life that they can actually then feel good about. Building confidence across all age groups. And then as I think we're getting to older ages and particularly into the sort of youth type age groups and being able to really value their opinions and have them as part of decision-making processes. Obviously being involved in decision-making at all levels is great, but even more so I think as children grow and develop. And then I guess as they move into that adolescent age, making sure that we have leadership programs and build that leadership right throughout life. And you can even do that with the little kids, but we need to step it up and build it up as we go through.

If you want to look at hopelessness, which is about that loss of connection, then we need to strengthen connections across all domains. And as I said before you guys are in the prime position for having really, really strong connections with children over many, many years, particularly in a school environment, where a child may actually be present for several years of their growing up years. So developing that support for family and community, as well, as part of the school environment, bringing community into the school to strengthen those connections, particularly for those children who are perhaps more alienated from their communities or are in out of home care. Develop a whole of school cohesion and connection and peer support sort of program that allows older children to also have some roles and some connections with younger kids, as you would have in a kinship system or a family system. Also then looking at broader society: who can support schools from the broader society? Who's going to be able to come in and actually support that local school community as well, and broaden out that sense of connection for kids?

And the final perspective I want to talk about in terms of connection is bringing in that broader ecological perspective. Certainly from an Aboriginal perspective, the idea of embedding children within nature, so that they are connected to their place and that they have purpose and it gives them meaning, is also a way of increasing a sense of connection, even as our world becomes smaller because of the sense of isolation we've experienced through COVID, the personal world actually becomes larger when we have these ecological connections. So making sure that children understand their local environment. That's why the notion of custodianship is so important. We look after nature and nature looks after us. And that can be a very nurturing and very strong relationship that children can build also throughout life. In a sense if you know your place, if you know your culture, if you know your homeland, you're never, ever really lost or alone, because there's something that you are connected to within your environment. And that can be a very, very powerful and very resilient building strategy.

And then the third component of course, is the interpersonal or the personal trauma that we may experience and our own reaction to what is happening to the trauma that is unfolding, both around us and also to us through this pandemic. And so the way of getting out of that sort of helplessness is to enhance mastery. So mastery and personal skill development across all ages will help to combat the impact of trauma. And what trauma does is it does actually disrupt the ability to develop mastery. And what I mean by mastery is that ability to just be able to do things, you know, probably the first time a child successfully ties their shoe laces or learns to ride a bike. These are all mastery skills that we build up over time. And so we might call it mastery in the early years, but as we build up our ability to be competent and able, then that turns into personal agency as we get older. So in adolescents, we want our young people to be able to feel capable and confident, know how to do things and trust their own judgment. So these things are a little bit overlapping, but if we do focus particularly on skill development, as part of mastery and personal agency across the lifespan, then this does build resilient adults throughout life. 

So thinking about our coping skills, how we build in positive coping skills, how we understand how we've developed our defence mechanisms, the way we react to life stressors. And everybody reacts a little bit differently. There are some commonalities, but this is very personal. So this is really about developing those skills that actually make sense to each individual child. And within that we build in life lessons, meaning, and culture here is very, very important in terms of identity. So part of the way we can do this in early life is through storytelling, both the personal, the family, the community narrative, understanding how people overcame adversity. And storytelling is a great way of doing that. And it's not just relevant for young children. It's actually relevant right across the entire lifespan, including in adolescents. It may take a different form.
Storytelling can also be through words and language, through books, but it can also be through visual mediums through art, through music. A whole pile of different sort of creative ways we can express and tell stories. And so we may move through different modalities throughout a child's life.

And of course the other aspect of that then that becomes very important is to support the development of identity. That sense of personal competence and capability. Who am I? I know who I am. I know where I'm connected. I know where I'm from and I know what my whole family system and my place in society is. Those sorts of personal elements of identity don't just start in adolescence. They actually start in very early childhood. And so they're built upon throughout all of the different developmental stages.

So if we're going to look at these three aspects of dealing with both empowerment, with reconnection, as well as with that enhancing of mastery and personal skills, we have to build them up from early life and we keep building them out up throughout development. So that when adversity faces us later in life, we already have the coping skills to get in early, be able to know what to do. And that will lessen the impact of other issues that we may face later on.

So at the end of all of that, we want I am, I can, and I do. And they're the sort of elements that we want to create for our children and our young people throughout education. And of course, if we do all of this it's going to enhance a child's capacity to learn, to be able to take on different sort of learning styles and understand life in a much more comprehensive way.

So, apart from looking at that, the sort of impact of COVID. We also then have to understand, as I said earlier, that with the renewed focus on wellbeing, we must not only understand the last two years, but really the last 20 years and how this has actually impacted on our children and our families. And it's quite disturbing when you see some of the data and you see the lack of services available. We've had quite a lot of investment in the last 20 years in youth. And in that sort of older youth, particularly the sort of sixteens to twenty-fives and a little bit in the sort of teenage years. But we've had very, very little investment in the under twelves and in the early years. And yet when you think about it from all of the evidence that we have and all of the data that we have and the research, we know that you can't just suddenly fix up wellbeing when you're 16. It really has to be built upon from those early ages. And if you just reflect back on that graph about brain development that I talked about before, much, much harder to intervene later in life than it is earlier. So I think we really do have to reorient ourselves to thinking about what's required in the early years, because whatever we invest in the early years will pay us back tenfold later on down the track.

So my concern, I think in particular, about about children and youth in general, but more so for the younger ones, do we need a coalition for children's mental health, education and safety? I'm not quite sure where we go from here. It was great to hear the initiatives being undertaken in education that Julia spoke about, but there's not enough initiative right across all of the other systems which you guys have to also interact with. There hasn't been enough investment in mental health, for example, in the early years, that can then actually support schools in early education centres in their work.

Where is the voice of the services that actually work with younger children? I hear so many people talk about the fact that mental ill health starts early in life. But where are the people that deal with the kids early in life that we need to hear from, who represent those children's and some of those family voices that we don't get to hear of very often. I think the youth voice is probably quite well heard, but we're lacking those voices of the earlier years.

I also wonder whether we should have a policy that looks at the child and family impact. And there's a lens that goes across everything so that we don't have unintended consequences. We're not really sure how we've ended up with so much challenge in mental health for our children. So much complexity now that we're seeing. And you have to reflect back and wonder, did we do things wrong? Did we get some things wrong? Were there unintended consequences of some of the policy directions that we've had in the past? We don't really know, but what we do want to make sure is that we don't allow that to happen in the future. So whatever we do in society that's going to affect children and families this, this impact lens needs to be applied.

I also wonder how we get more effective engagement with all of our systems that work with our children. You really only get one chance at childhood. You can't repeat your childhood. I know some people have their midlife crisis and go back to their teen years in their fifties, but probably not a very good way of healing the past. So, what we really need to do is be able to form this kind of coalition where all of the people involved in dealing with our children actually come together in a more effective way. And that includes education, mental health, child protection, juvenile justice. In fact, if you think about many of the children who are in our juvenile justice systems, they have significant mental health challenges that have not been addressed, probably started early in life, with a lot of adversity that they had been exposed to. And so we've really failed those children along their developmental spectrum and being able to pick them up early and give them the support that they need. And of course because you guys have our children for such a long period of time, early educators and school environments are absolutely critical in the pathway back and in the general role in recovery for children who have had this adversity early in life.

So we know that children are our future, they're our hope. I certainly hope that the experience for my grandchild yet to be born is going to be much better than the experience my grandmother had, that was incredibly traumatising and difficult. So children need strong, safe enduring relationships with carers. Absolutely essential. However, I would add to that they also need strong, safe, enduring relationships with people in society as well.

Geri Sumpter

Thanks everybody, and thank you so much to Professor Helen Milroy for that incredible presentation. I do apologise for the technical challenges that we had there at the end. I think Helen's internet cut out on us, but I think there's a lot of reflection to be had on that session. I'd love to hear some of your comments in the discussion forum if you'd like to pop them in there, or if you've got any further questions, please pop those in the chat and we'll make sure that we answer those questions through our feedback, post the conference.

Now you do have time now for a quick break. Our next session will be starting at 12.00pm AEST. So please make sure you take that time to go and get yourself a cup of tea, have a stretch, take a break. The next session is going to be fabulous. It is an educator panel chaired by headspace Schools, Clinical Lead Ebony Gill. And the title is Exploring empowerment across learning communities. And we've got some fabulous speakers in there. 

So thanks for joining the conference. Really great to have you on board and we look forward to seeing you again around 12. Thanks very much to everybody.

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