Monash University Evaluation
The importance of a whole-school, long-term approach to students wellbeing.
Key findings
Our School Wellbeing Program uses a whole-school preventative approach to mental health by providing students, staff and parents with the knowledge, tools and resources they need to support their mental wellbeing and build resilience.Â
This independent evaluation by Monash University examines the effectiveness of our School Wellbeing Program using a sample of over 40,000 secondary school students across Australia. The findings speak to the significant benefits of its long-term implementation for the mental health of school communities.Â
After six years, students at The Resilience Project schools saw:
Higher scores across all positive mental health outcomes, including life satisfaction, hope and coping skills.
Significantly lower odds of mental illness (34% lower for anxiety and 47% lower for depression).
Program implementation is also key. The mental health outcomes of high-quality program implementation have been found to be twice as high than low-quality implementation.
About the study
With the support of her advisory team, Psychiatry Registrar and PhD Candidate at Monash University, Roshini Balasooriya Lekamge, investigated the strength of our School Wellbeing Program using a sample of over 40,000 secondary school students across Australia.Â
A quasi-experimental study with an intervention and a control group was used to evaluate The Resilience Project’s School Wellbeing Program in 40,149 students across 102 schools in 2023. Data collected included sociodemographic information and outcomes derived from validated scales, included life satisfaction, hope, coping skills, anxiety and depression. Intervention schools were arranged by the number of years they had implemented the program, and mixed-effects regression models were used to evaluate the program.
The study used a sample of students from Year 7 to Year 12 in Australian secondary schools, with a mean age of 14. The intervention group included approximately 20,000 students that have been part of The Resilience Project’s School Wellbeing Program and the control group included approximately 20,000 students who have not been involved in the program. Both groups completed the Resilient Youth (RY) Student Resilience Survey.Â
As the study did not randomly allocate participating schools into the intervention and control groups, the possibility of selection bias exists which means participants of the two groups may be systematically different from each other in a way that’s not due to chance alone.Â
The second major limitation is that pre-test results were not available. Ideally, it would be best to measure the mental health outcomes both before and after an intervention takes place as the groups may differ from each other in systematic ways which can influence the outcomes. This could not be done in this study as the data was all anonymous to help students feel comfortable to honestly respond to the questions in the survey.Â
The study has attempted to counteract these two biases by controlling for plausable confounders, including grade, gender, socioeconomic and rurality status. Â
The third limitation is that the responses could only be collected by students that were willing and present on the day of the survey due to the anonymous nature of the survey.Â
Furthermore, it is easy to presume that the intervention schools were better resourced than the control schools and that this might explain the results. However, it was found in this study that the intervention schools in the sample were actually from less well-resourced areas, including a higher proportion from low SES, rural and remote settings.Â
A big thank you to Roshini Balasooriya Lekamge, Monash University and Resilient Youth Australia for making this independent evaluation possible and for their ongoing commitment to mental health and wellbeing.
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The full article has been published in BJPsych Open and can be accessed here.Â
As featured in:Â
The research team
Strengthening whole-school approaches promoting mental health and preventing risk behaviours in Australian secondary schools.
Roshini is a Psychiatry Registrar with Alfred Health and PhD Candidate with the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University.
Her PhD investigates how we can strengthen whole-school approaches to wellbeing in Australian secondary schools. Roshini’s PhD adopts a mixed-method approach, combining a large-scale evaluation of a whole-school intervention implemented nationwide, with qualitative inquiries into the perspectives of Australian students concerning strategies for enhancing adolescent well-being.
Her work stands poised to inform evidence-based practices and policies aimed at fostering the well-being of young Australians.
More about Roshini Balasooriya Lekamge
About the advisors
