Hello and welcome to this podcast from Teacher magazine, the resource for K-12 educators published by ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research. I’m the Editor of Teacher, Jo Earp, and I’ll be your host today.
Welcome to this special episode, which is covering a really important topic for schools, at this time of the year in particular – disaster preparedness for the upcoming summer season here in Australia. So, this month school leaders, educators and systems leaders from every state and territory, across all school sectors across the country, attended a national briefing delivered by Headspace, and that’s in partnership with the National Emergency Management Agency and Bureau of Meteorology. The webinar, from that, shared insights on the potential impacts of weather and hazard-related events on school communities (including things like bushfires, floods and cyclones), and some practical resources. Now, I’ve put a link to the webinar recording and related resources in the transcript of this podcast at teachermagazine.com, so do have a look at that full briefing.
In this podcast, then, I’m joined by Kristen Douglas, who’s Head of Schools and Communities nationally for Headspace and a former principal. We’ll be talking about the 3 phases when disaster hits – so, preparation, response and recovery. This episode includes the importance of clear communication strategies in schools, including during that holiday period, and how educators and school leaders can help families prepare with some reminders ahead of the summer season. We’ll also discuss looking after your own wellbeing, as a school leader or adult member of the school community, and how to support students with their wellbeing too. That includes triggers that might happen; for example, coming up to the anniversary of previous emergencies, certain sounds, the smell of smoke, or just the feeling of a warm day. So, we’ll be talking about supporting conversations around that. Kristen also shares stories from school leaders illustrating how things have evolved over the years, and some of the new challenges that are cropping up. Now, the good news of course is that Australia already has some great systems and networks in place, and education systems are already doing fantastic work in this space; but as I say, this is a really important conversation to have at any time of the year. So, let’s get started.
Jo Earp: Kristen, welcome to the Teacher podcast. Now, before we explore some of those practicalities that school leaders can certainly be thinking about now, I'm interested in hearing a bit more about the collaboration itself and how that came about. I understand this is the first sort of national one that you've done. Is this something that was sort of flagged by leaders and school communities presumably as something they really wanted some more support on?
Kristen Douglas: Yeah, it's a good question, Jo. Well, it's come about for several reasons. It's come about because of the volume and quantum of natural disasters that we experience. Australia is highly susceptible to those and probably increasingly so. So, that's the first thing. The second thing is our school communities are at the hub of most towns, suburbs, areas and I think they play a really critical role in helping thousands of people, families, young people, their staff. So, in the work that we do in implementing a whole range of things across the country into schools and school communities it was very obvious that natural disasters was something that we needed to continue to support.
But, can I say from the outset, all of the departments of education in every state and territory, all of the dioceses, all of the independent associations, have been doing a highly sophisticated job already in supporting their schools. So, this national strategy and rollout that we are embarking on is to wrap around what they're doing. And often departments of education are doing incredible jobs around emergency management planning – working with, you know, SES [state emergency services] and local emergency services, making sure emergency action plans are in place, all of those sorts of things. What we're rolling out essentially is a trauma-informed toolkit so humans can better support humans when a natural disaster happens. And that means giving good quality skills to principals, reinforcing practising those skills so they can lead staff, students and families basically in some of the most difficult times.
JE: Yeah. That's a great point to make and to acknowledge all the work that's gone on already because it's fantastic, isn't it? When you see those school communities and departments and the community in general coming together and the response agencies after things happen – and unfortunately, we've seen that happen in previous summers and, and throughout the year actually. Okay, so a bit of context for our international listeners then. Headspace is Australia's National Youth Mental Health Foundation, and you're the Head of Schools and Communities there. You've partnered with the National Emergency Management Agency and the Bureau of Meteorology here in Australia for this particular national briefing. So, it's not just about being prepared in terms of the summer season, but also things like resilience. And as you say, that human aspect. So not just responding to challenges, but also those opportunities as well. And we're going to explore some of those practicalities now. First of all, then, what do we know already in terms of the outlook for the rest of Spring and Summer in terms of those emerging hazards, then?
KD: It probably comes as no surprise Jo, but I think the Bureau's anticipating quite a few back-to-back peak heat periods. And I think that, you know, there's a whole range of vulnerable people in the community. We've got cost of living going on in Australia. We've got lots of people who are choosing whether they turn on air conditioning or not. I think that's the first thing. The second thing is we've got vulnerable, like older aged people and little kids, particularly vulnerable in heat and significant heat periods. So, I think the secondary issue to back-to-back days at 40 degrees and heat periods is you've had a bit of growth, a bit of rain in some areas. And then of course, things turn into a tinderbox. And that's where we have concerns around bushfires.
So, what we're hoping the briefing will do is have a national outlook. Principals and school leaders and sector and system education leaders will be dialling in and they get to have a look at the whole scan of Australia, some of the forecasts for November, December into January, February; and it will dig down into state and territory, not into local or regional. A lot of departments of education are doing their own regional outlooks and various things. So, it's more a national perspective, canvassing state and territories, looking at pocket and peak regions of risk. And I guess just gently reminding principals that if they exist in those regions or certain sections of their state and territory, they need to be thinking about messaging for their young people, their families. They need to be thinking about their own preparation and the preparation of staff in that space.
The other thing that's really relevant is we've got a whole range of schools going into this summer having their first anniversary from last year's fires, or their second or third anniversary from really significant fires 2, 3, 4 years ago. This can be really triggering for people. It can be really concerning, it can bring up a lot of re-emerging stressors or grief, loss of pets, loss of property, you know, that sense of disconnection. So, it can really make people quite wobbly coming into the season. And things like the smell of smoke or the, you know, the prediction of a 40-degree day, that might be enough to set someone's central nervous system off, get them stressed again, get them in high alert. And that's, you know, I think it's just creating awareness around those things.
JE: So yeah, I mean, another great point. Like you say, even just that feeling of a warm day, really hot day, or there might be some controlled burn offs, for example, but that smoke in the air, even just the sound of the alarms going off, you know, one of the response vehicles going out to an emergency can be really triggering as well. And we've already had recently school closures up in south-east Queensland, wasn't there, for flash flooding. It's a huge country, Australia, so everybody's facing slightly different things. So, there's heat, there's floods, there's potential, you know, cyclones, things like that. If there is a period of disruption then or a specific emergency, how can school leaders and school staff support wellbeing during that peak time?
KD: I mean, obviously before school ends – and a lot of school ends in the, you know, second and third week of December – I think communication is really important. Saying that if for whatever reason, our school or community experiences a natural disaster in the next month we're on holidays, this will be the communication plan with staff. This is how we communicate with parents. We rely on information from our department or sector or association to help guide us around protection of properties and things. But you know, hopefully if something happens, being on school holidays is a protective factor because, you know, you don't have hundreds of kids gathered together at school.
I think it is more just around, maybe gently reminding young people and families about preservation, protection of themselves in their home environments; travelling and travelling to holiday spaces and anticipating that and making good decisions around when to depart holiday spaces if you're getting weather warnings. Where to look out for weather warnings – do you rely on the BoM [Bureau of Meteorology] app, do you rely on local radio and ABC and other things? So, just generally we've got to build capacity of people to anticipate things and giving people some scenario planning, giving people some tips and strategies, that's how we continue to build.
Can I just say, I think from a really helpful perspective, Australia is incredibly sophisticated in this space. And I've recently presented at a global forum around large-scale disasters and mass casualty events; I was there presenting on Bondi. And what became very real after listening to several of our international colleagues, we have incredible resources. We have incredible processes. NEMA – the National Emergency Management Agency – and all of the state and territory peak bodies, we're very well set up, sadly, because we've had to be. But I do, I feel very buoyant the fact that we're quite sophisticated in responding to these things, responding quickly, putting things in place and responding in a way that's helpful to community resilience.
JE: You mentioned there about communication and that's something I just want to come back to briefly in terms of preparing for that. That's vital, isn't it? Getting those communication structures in place. Because we often think about a School Strategy and, you know, your literacy and numeracy. How are you going to communicate with parents on results and all kinds of things. But that communication aspect, the clarity of that, making staff aware who's going to be in that structure, what the process is. That's so crucial, isn't it, to get that right from the outset.
KD: Of course, and it’s this time of year – I used to be a school principal, so I can say this with some level of understanding – this time of year, you've got staff who might be leaving your school, you've got new staff that might be joining. So, it's really hard to do induction with new staff coming in. They won't know the expectations or the processes. You might have transitioning parents coming in if you're a primary school, you've got little preps or kindies coming in and you haven't necessarily briefed those families. You might have year 6-7 transition from primary school to high school. And I think, you know, having that, it's a difficult time of year to make sure that you've got everyone, you know, on the WhatsApp or on the communication channel of your preferred choice. The other thing is in natural disasters, power goes down, Wi-Fi goes down; so, you can't necessarily rely on being able to send out messaging in the way that you might expect. And also, people are all over the place during Christmas and holiday periods. So, checking on your families and, you know, the safety of your families and making sure that you've got a bit of an understanding about where everyone is – that can be really difficult too.
And I think just generally, as I’ve said, if you're coming into an anniversary, it's giving some tips and strategies about looking after yourself as an adult but also being conscious that your child might be feeling a bit wobbly and seeing re-emerging images in media and things like that, and how to support conversations in the lead up to summer. If you have had a fire or flood in your area.
JE: So, let's drill down into that a little bit, then. From your expertise at Headspace – and you work with tens of thousands of young people and educators as well – tell me a bit about those kinds of strategies that might be useful in terms of the youth mental health side of things and emergency management. And, also, not just the response, but it's a balancing act, isn't it? We don't want to frighten them either with, you know, being really kind of high alert at the beginning. And it's such a balancing act, isn't it?
KD: Yeah. And things have really changed. And so, you know, the obvious framework that we approach this sort of school community resilience is we think about preparedness, we think about response, and we think about recovery. And recovery can take years and years and years. So, in terms of preparedness, it's the more you capacity-build people, you let them practise, you let them learn, you trial different scenarios, the more they feel confident that things are in place, that if the worst day happens or something terrible happens they've got things in place. They know who to rely on. They've got the structures to make decisions, to communicate, to support, to care for those people. And so that's preparing. And I think schools are getting better around that. The toolkit that we'll be rolling out with departments of education and sectors next year is very much – here is 50/60 things practically to help prepare your students, your staff, yourself and your family. So, we've got a toolkit around preparing.
The response window can be really hard. Responding to any critical incident, particularly a natural disaster, it moves at chaotic pace. You're trying to track people down. You're trying to support people in distress. You're trying to make decisions about opening or closing your school. You might have lost roads and bridges, which means staff are on one side of the bridge and can't get to the school. You can't, you know, rely on communication or, or maybe utilities or things might be shut down. You think about water security, you've got choppers landing in the back oval, you know, because sometimes schools are used as evacuation locations. There is a whole range of things. You can't come at that without doing some preparation. And if you're living in a town or a suburb that has previously had some sort of natural disasters, I've no doubt you've thought about it.
But there's new things that we need to think about. We've got more and more neurodivergent young people in our schools than ever before. The sound of a ‘woop woop’ alarm or, you know, significant sirens really changes how you might manage neurodiverse staff or neurodiverse students in an emergency situation. You need to think about that. You need to think about young people who might be, you know, have a disability. You need to think about young people who might be experiencing anxiety. You need to think about staff who have kids at other schools. There's all of these factors you need to weigh in. And you need to think about things like the staff that are actually volunteer firefighters. And we've had a lot of experience where staff and principals show up to their school to look after their children and their families, and their house is perishing, you know. And educators and school leaders are pretty incredible. They put their school communities first, even though their house is in that community. And, you know, I'm sure they want to be home fighting that fire or pulling things out of flood water. So, it's very complex. That response window just moves at such chaotic pace and it's all about preservation of life, but it's also about preservation of people's wellbeing and mental health and trying to reduce trauma and trauma exposure.
And then the recovery, you know, that, as I said, that can be high fatigue, long tail. You're trying to rebuild you're trying to get the school community back. And all in all, you just want to get back to learning, but it can really disrupt and delay that for many people. And the echo effects and aftereffects on towns – you lose jobs, you lose employment, people can't move back into the area because of insurance. We see suicide goes up, domestic violence goes up. All of the things that you would assume that are catalysts in community that strip resilience out of communities, that happens. And the 3 words that, you know, NEMA and lots of other agencies use – and these are relatively new, contemporary words – is compounding, concurrent, and cumulative. And what those words represent is you have a town like Lismore who's had a one-in-a-hundred-year flood, and then in quick succession they have another one, in quick succession they have another one … that community doesn't have time to recover. They go from response into response, into response. Now, if you've already had resilience stripped out of your individuals and your communities after the first response, it's absolutely stripped out from the second and the third experience. People don't get a chance to restabilise, to feel safe again, to recover and, you know, it's really complex things that we see in community, mental health and wellbeing then.
JE: It is, it's so complex, isn't it. I'm thinking about the school leaders in all of this. And so there's a lot of things, a lot of articles that we do (and like you said, they're incredible people, school leaders and teachers and particularly in those rural areas as well, or small communities where they're doing several jobs really and they're often volunteers as well at the same time. I mean, they are in the big areas as well. Let's give a shout out to everybody that does that). But, yeah, they seem to carry a lot of weight and in the community as well, the school leader can be, we certainly saw this in something like Covid, for example, the school leader becomes a very important focal point for the community. And so, thinking about the pressures on them, what can they do to relieve that pressure to get support themselves? Because probably the last thing they're going to be thinking about is their own mental health. They're going to be thinking about the communities, about the kids, about the staff, about everybody but themselves. So, what would you be recommending for the for the leaders themselves?
KD: Yeah. Schools become the … for many families, schools are a trusted source of information. In fact, they'd probably prefer to call their school principal or the business manager, the front office person or their teacher to get information about the weather than they do look at a weather app sometimes. You know. What are we doing? Are we closing? Are we staying open? How are we keeping the kids safe? So, there's a lot. So, I think, you know, there has to be a level of protection around education sectors and departments putting in good teams and wrapping good teams around principals and schools to help make decisions and make them effectively and make them in a way that doesn't, you know, create conflict in school communities. So, you know, ‘are we open, are we closed’. We do see a little bit of conflict sometimes with a Catholic school is closed, the government school’s open the independent school is, you know, still making decisions. And that can be quite hard, I think, for schools to manage. So having a good system team around you is really helpful for principals.
Having relationships with local services – the SES, police, all of those sorts of ... so, you don't get to put those relationships in place when you're in chaos and response. You need to do it well in advance. So that's another thing. I think having a good team in the leadership group and at school where, you know, the first couple of days can be incredibly fatiguing. So, can you step aside while somebody else helps lead? Having clear roles – Who's calling the parents? Who's protecting the infrastructure? Who's talking to the Department of Education? Who's checking where the kids are at? Who's calling in the regional psychology team? So, all of these jobs need to be allocated and deployed. So, having a good list of who's doing what and when are we doing it?
And I think, you know, that preparing, as I said, we've got a whole checklist of how to better prepare yourself, your staff, your students and your families. And a little bit of the briefing will be spent on that toolkit and preparing your school community. And then we've got training that we're rolling out next year, which we're really hoping to engage school leaders in because it’s very practical, very contemporary in that it picks up all of the things around neurodivergence anniversaries; you know, a lot of the more contemporary trauma-informed thinking. So yeah, without cataloguing all of the preparing checklists, there's a lot that schools can do.
I think the thing that school leaders can do – and I've been doing large-scale crisis and critical incidents with principals for years and years – is at some point stop and have a check-in chat and debrief. Because you're holding and absorbing everyone else's stressors and everyone else's trauma sometimes, and we see the aftereffects of burnout, compassion, fatigue, vicarious trauma, all of those sorts of experiences that I see in principals because they do absorb so much from their school community. And we need to give them a chance to offset, reflect, debrief, and hopefully not carry it into the next calendar year or next term.
JE: Just a couple more questions and then I'll let you go. Presumably this is something that's constantly evolving. I mean, as the climate changes, it's evolving anyway. Those challenges and opportunities will continue to evolve. We've got new technology and all sorts of things. I'm just interested because, like you say, you've been working with principals for years. What changes have you noticed then? Certainly, as you say, Australia has become excellent at this kind of management, haven't they? But what other kinds of changes as well have you noticed?
KD: I think as much as we've become sophisticated, there are always new things to manage. I was talking to a principal up in Lismore, and this is a year or 2 ago. And, you know, I said ‘what was the most difficult thing about the last couple of weeks?’ And it wasn't the water damaging his school. It wasn't, you know, the safety concerns of his staff. People had dropped off thousands and thousands of dollars, like I'm talking $160,000 worth of gift cards to his school. And he said, ‘all I could think about was managing this’. And he said, ‘I literally had to put 2 or 3 staff on this job of sorting out these donations of these gift cards, because I thought, what happens if I get done for fraud?’ And, you know, it was creating this whole, ‘I hadn't even anticipated it’. Another principal from a similar area, you know, a woman had driven from Brisbane all the way down and had dropped off this car full of donated shoes. Adult donated shoes. And he said, ‘oh, thanks, that's really generous but we don't, we’re actually not taking donations, and we don't need adult shoes’. And well, she got really upset at him, you know, ‘how dare you not accept my donation’.
So, things you wouldn't even think about. You know, things like protection of school animals and school farm animals and pets. I was recently working out in Port Macquarie, mid-North coast. We had this most amazing student panel, and one of the year 11/year 12 boys sitting on the panel said, ‘everyone wanted to get me counselling after the floods’, he said, ‘all I wanted was a new laptop. I lost all my work on my laptop and that's all I needed’. And, you know, there was another little girl who'd lost a cat and she'd lost her, family home had been absolutely destroyed. She just wanted some new clothes that weren't second hand. So, I think creating some awareness around those sorts of things can be really helpful. Because we tend to go straight to the emergency management and, you know, it's all about infrastructure and assets and things like that, which is fine, but there's a lot of human stuff that goes on. And it's just sometimes just highlighting that and making principals aware. And once you make them aware of that they lead from a much more holistic, trauma-informed lens.
JE: And making sure that everybody involved can have those conversations, and time and space, like you said, to try and debrief a little and actually listening to what it is that they need at that point in time in their context. That's been brilliant. So, for listeners, then we want to get hold of those practical resources. As I say, I'm going to pop a link into that recording of the webinar – that national webinar, which is going to be super useful. If they want to get hold of other practical resources and action points, where can they find those? On the Headspace site?
KD: Yeah. So, in the show notes, we can put the website, the URL where we've got all of the resources. So next year we'll be rolling out the toolkit, which helps principals and school staff prepare, and help students prepare and staff, and gives you some tips and strategies about those checklists and practical resources that I've talked about. So, we'll be rolling that out across the country. So, we're hoping that gets taken up. We're working with departments of ed and sectors at the moment to work out how to do that most effectively. Again, not crossing over emergency management, but complementing.
The second thing we've got available to schools next year is psychological first aid for school leaders, which is incredible. It's not mental health first aid, a lot of people mix those 2 up. Psychological first aid is a framework of how to lead humans in the first 0-24 hours of an absolute crisis. How to talk to them, how to relate to them, how to connect with them, how to guide them in crisis. And it's really critical. It's very well recognised in international spaces and emergency management spaces. So, we're bringing that in for principals – that's free and available for school leaders across the country. The third thing is reflective practice sessions for school staff who may have been impacted by natural disasters in the last couple of years. And the last thing which we're super excited about is student-led preparedness projects or recovery projects. And that could be anything from painting a mural which tells the story of the fire or the flood in a helpful way, and hope and resilience in community. It might be running parent engagement sessions. It might be planting a thousand trees to, you know, create better environment around the school. It could be anything. But we work with the students, they design the project, we help them implement and activate the project. And it's just a beautiful way for them to get involved in their own community resilience and community recovery if that's where it's at.
JE: That sounds fantastic! So, I'll put links into all those things into the transcript of this podcast too, which is available at teachermagazine.com. Kristin Douglas, thanks so much for joining Teacher magazine today to share your expertise and those action points and the supports for schools. It's really such an important conversation to have.
KD: Good on you Jo, have a good end of the year.
So, a quick update for you on the host page for the summer briefing webinar that we talked about in this episode. You can also go there to access presentations from the Bureau of Meteorology and National Emergency Management Agency, there are FAQs there which include further links to resources, including things like thunderstorm asthma, there are storybooks and videos for younger children there, and heat management plan guidance. That’s all for this episode – thanks for listening, wherever you are. If you enjoyed this chat, please take a moment to follow our show on your podcast app if you haven't already and do leave us a review. Both of those things help more people like you to find our podcast and they're a really big help to our team, so thanks for that. We'll be back with a new episode very soon.
Teacher Magazine is published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.
