After three years of staff training, Orange Public School has been recognised as a KidsMatter school, part of a program formulated by mental health and education experts and co-funded by beyondblue and the federal government. 

Teachers Sharon Cope and Rachel French have been co-ordinating KidsMatter since 2015 and showcased the program at a suicide prevention forum last week.

While depression and anxiety are more often considered teenage and adult conditions, Mrs French said they were sometimes present in primary school-aged children who worried about their academic performance. 

“Anxiety is a big one,” she said. 

“We do lots of talk about red thoughts and green thoughts and if we are having lots of red thoughts, ways we can turn them around into positive thoughts, green thoughts.”

The first focus was creating a positive and inclusive environment for the students and their families.

“We did a survey where we found out all the different cultures involved in the school and we made welcome signs in our office for all those different languages, we were really amazed with how many there were,” Mrs French said. 

The school also looked at the playground itself, adding extra games to the cement and a buddy bench.

“If kids in the playground are feeling a bit sad, that’s a place they can go and sit and calm down and we train the other kids that if they see a child sitting there to go over and ask them to come and play,” Mrs French said. 

“They love it, probably more so [at the infants school] than as they get older I think, but it works.”

While students have always taken part in social and emotional learning Mrs French said Fun Friends for kindergarten to year 2 and Friends for Life for years 3-6 were more pinpointed. 

“Every week, it’s a 20-minute lesson where we teach kids about building resilience, which gives them lots of skills to do with their friendships, learning how to sort problems out,” Mrs French said. 

She said parents had also been involved more to create better cohesion.

“I think it makes kids feel very important when their parents come in.”