What "Are you OK?" sounds like at Y Community School

R U OK? Day falls on Thursday 10 September this year, and it is a useful prompt for all of us. Ask the question. Listen properly. Follow up.

At Y Community School, though, the question is not the hard part. Most young people have been asked if they are OK plenty of times. What matters is whether the person asking has built enough trust to hear an honest answer, and whether anything happens next.

That is really what our wellbeing approach is about.

Wellbeing is the condition for learning, not a break from it

Every young person who walks through our door at our Epping Senior Campus  has a history with school. For many, that history includes long absences, anxiety about being in a classroom, bullying, family stress, caring responsibilities, or a disability that was never properly supported. Some have not been in a classroom for a year or more.

If a young person is scanning the room for exits, they are not learning. So, we do not treat wellbeing as a program that runs on Tuesday afternoons. It is the condition that makes everything else possible.

In practice, that looks like small classes, predictable routines, and staff who greet every student by name at the start of the day. It looks like a space a student can step out to when they need it without a consequence. It looks like knowing which students had a rough weekend before we ask them to sit down and write.

Trauma-aware means changing what we do, not just what we know

Trauma-aware practice gets talked about a lot in education. For us it is less about the language and more about the decisions it changes.

It means we assume behaviour is communication. A young person who walks out of a session is telling us something, and our first job is to work out what, not to record an infringement. It means we build relationships before we build expectations, because compliance without trust does not last past the first difficult week. It means we look at what a student can control and give them as much of it as we safely can, because so many of them have had very little control over what has happened to them.

It also means we are honest about limits. We are a school, not a clinical service. Part of our role is knowing when a young person needs support beyond what we provide and making that referral work rather than handing over a phone number.

The check-in that actually counts

THRIVE daily check-ins are part of our practice, however often the most useful check-ins at our school are rarely the formal ones. They happen while making toast in the kitchen, setting up for a session, or during a shared activity where nobody has to make eye contact.

Our staff are trained to notice the small shifts. A student who usually arrives at 9.30am turning up at 11am for three days in a row. Someone who has stopped taking their headphones off. A young person who is suddenly very keen to talk about anything except themselves.

Those observations get shared. Teachers, educational youth workers and wellbeing specialists consult, so a concern raised on Monday morning is not sitting in one person's head on Friday.

What families and referrers can take from this

If you are a parent, carer or worker who is wondering whether a young person could re-engage with education, the honest answer is that it usually does not start with the curriculum. It starts with whether they can get through the door, and then through the week.

We plan for that.  Enrolment at Y Community School is not conditional on a young person arriving regulated, confident and ready to learn. It is conditional on them wanting something different, and on us being able to build a plan around them.

Guided by the Y's values of caring, honesty, respect, responsibility and safety, our commitment is simple. We ask the question, we make it safe to answer, and we do something with what we hear.

If you would like to talk about a young person who has disengaged from school, contact Y Community School on 9407 6229 or ycs.epping@yschool.vic.edu.au