Growing up is hard.
Adolescence — that tricky period between childhood and adulthood — is often rife with physical, psychological and social change. For many young people, it’s also a high-risk period for the emergence of mental ill health. Globally, one in 7 people aged 10–19 experiences a mental disorder, according to the World Health Organisation (2021); in Australia, rates of self-harm are at their highest in the 15–19 age group (AIHW, 2023) and suicide is the leading cause of death for young people aged 15–24 (AIHW, 2024).
Early intervention is vital to connecting at-risk young people to appropriate support for their mental health. While parents and carers are often the first to recognise the signs of mental ill health, secondary school teachers also have a role to play in supporting young people’s wellbeing.
But, like many trusted adults in young people’s lives, teachers often feel ill-equipped to provide guidance for teenagers who are in distress. In part, this is because teachers often don’t receive mental health training — in a recent article in BMC Public, researchers noted that ‘mental health training is not a compulsory unit of study as defined by Australian national teacher training standards’ (Gunawardena, et al 2024).
Further, countless studies and news articles have pointed to the challenges that many teachers face in trying to meet the basic demands of their jobs. A 2022 survey from the Grattan Institute found that 90% of teachers felt they didn’t have enough time to prepare for classroom teaching (Hunter & Sonnemann, 2022); finding the time to engage with mental health training outside of the school’s setting can therefore feel like a bridge too far.
This complex picture was the driving force behind the development of the Building Educators’ Skills in Adolescent Mental Health (BEAM) training program by Black Dog Institute, a leading research organisation with expertise in adolescent mental health. Co-designed with teachers, BEAM was created specifically to empower year advisors and other education leaders to recognise and respond to the signs of mental ill health in their students.
Designed by and for secondary school teachers
BEAM emerged from Black Dog Institute research which found a lack of available mental health training programs designed to improve secondary school teachers’ knowledge, attitudes and helping behaviours in response to mental ill health in students.
This finding led Institute researchers to engage a group of year advisors to explore the sort of education and skills development that teachers needed to better support their students (O’Dea et al, 2021). In response to these conversations, the first iteration of BEAM was developed and piloted among 70 teachers from 28 schools. Following the success of the pilot (Parker et al, 2021), a randomised control trial of BEAM was delivered to 295 educators from 73 government and non-government secondary schools in regional and metropolitan areas.
Randomised control trial rial results showed that teachers who completed BEAM reported higher levels of confidence in supporting students’ mental health and higher levels of perceived mental health knowledge, awareness and literacy compared to a control group (O’Dea et al, 2023). More than 90% of teachers reported that the BEAM training was relevant and helpful for their everyday role, easy to use, and that each topic was engaging.
Feedback from these trials shaped BEAM into what it is today: a series of 5 online, self-directed learning modules and peer coaching activities that are designed to help teachers:
- identify adolescent mental health issues
- understand how to provide appropriate support in the school setting
- facilitate early intervention that connects student to effective professional help.
In 2023, BEAM received professional accreditation from the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA). It is now empowering teachers to support young people’s mental health in government, Catholic and independent secondary schools nationally.
Grounded in the research evidence
This detailed process of trialling, iterating and re-trialling BEAM has been vital to establishing the robust evidence base that underpins the program. Its online, self-paced nature allows teachers to choose how they fit their BEAM learning around their other job demands.
‘We completed this course as a pastoral team, including the Head of Senior School, Head of Wellbeing, year coordinators and assistant year coordinators. The information contained in the course was relevant to our day-to-day experiences supporting students with mental health at school,’ says Alana Koch, Head of Wellbeing at St Luke’s Grammar School in Sydney.
‘We did our peer mentoring sessions at the same time and then shared ideas and questions, which was most useful in establishing norms about how we support our students.’
BEAM’s successes speak both to the richness of Black Dog Institute’s approach — the Institute’s researchers both draw on and contribute to the latest research evidence in the field of adolescent mental health — and the power of co-design as a way of ensuring the end product reflects the needs and experiences of the target user group.
‘We know from the work we’ve done with teachers over these last 5 years that they want to help students who are in distress or who they think might be at risk of developing a mental health condition,’ says Kate Cope, BEAM Program Manager at Black Dog Institute.
‘At the same time, there’s a lot being asked of teachers in terms of the demands of their roles and the challenges facing the education workforce, particularly in the aftermath of COVID-19.
‘Our goal was to develop a program that was designed by and for teachers that really acknowledges the challenges of trying to upskill in a high-pressure profession. I think we’ve done that by creating something that acknowledges the passion that teachers bring to their work while allowing them to control the time, pace and location of their learning.’
Find out how BEAM can empower teachers to support student mental health at your school by visiting blackdoginstitute.org.au/education-services/beam/.
References:
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2023). Intentional self-harm hospitalisations among young people. https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/populations-age-groups/intentional-self-harm-hospitalisations-among-young
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2024). Leading causes of death. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/life-expectancy-deaths/deaths-in-australia/contents/leading-causes-of-death
Gunawardena, H., Leontini, R., Nair, S., Cross, S. & Hickie, I. (2024). Teachers as first responders: classroom experiences and mental health training needs of Australian schoolteachers. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-17599-z
Hunter, J. & Sonnemann, J. (2022). Making time for great teaching: How better government policy can help. Grattan Institute. https://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Making-time-for-great-teaching-how-better-government-policy-can-help-Grattan-Report.pdf
O’Dea, B., Anderson, M., Subotic-Kerry, M. & Parker, B. (2021). Secondary school Year Advisors’ perspectives on their role, responsibilities and training needs for student mental health: Insights from a co-design workshop. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-294624/v1
O’Dea, B., Parker, B., Batterham, P.J., Chakouch, C., Mackinnon, A.J., Whitton, A. E., Newby, J. M., Subotic-Kerry, M., Gayed, A. & Harvey, S. B. (2023). A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial on the Effectiveness of the Building Educators’ Skills in Adolescent Mental Health (BEAM) Program for Improving Secondary School Educators’ Confidence, Behavior, Knowledge, and Attitudes Toward Student Mental Health. Journal of Teacher Education, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871231208684
Parker, B. L., Anderson, M., Batterham, P.J., Gayed, A., Subotic-Kerry, M., Achilles, M. R., Chakouch, C., Werner-Seidler, A., Whitton, A. & O’Dea, B. (2021). Building Educators’ Skills in Adolescent Mental Health (BEAM): Examining the acceptability and preliminary effectiveness of a web-based training program for Australian secondary school teachers. https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/29989
World Health Organization. (2021). Mental Health of Adolescents. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health
