Introducing the Community
St Francis de Sales College, Mount Barker
St Francis de Sales is a K-12 Secondary Catholic Education School in Mt Barker, South Australia
St Francis de Sales is a Catholic Education South Australia school community that provides a high quality learning and growth environment for children from pre-school to year 12.
LBI Foundation has partnered with the school community since 2023. This capacity building work has focused on embedding the IMPACT Program as mapped to the needs, context and desired outcomes of the education community.
The support has been personalised to the school and geographic community. The co-designed wellbeing framework has been aligned to the school’s values. The work has also sought to strengthen the implementation of broader Catholic Education of South Australia’s wellbeing frameworks and learning initiatives (Living Learning Leading and Learn Well), as well as the whole-of-state CESA implementation of the Clarity framework.
The intent (or outcomes) and actions of this work is summarised below.
Intent ('What')
Build a Wellbeing and Trauma Responsive Educational Community
Where Wellbeing is a Way of Thinking and Being
Made Practical Through the Following Co-Designed Outcomes
System
To embed a cohesive, intentional, integrated and common approach (across main site and child care) to:
- Implement a safe, growth-focused and wellbeing-responsive learning environment.
- Deliver personalised student wellbeing and support services and to meet all students at their individual starting point (needs and context).
- Embed a trauma-responsive, neurodiversity-affirming and inclusive support culture.
Educators
To embed the awareness, skills and mindsets to:
- Intentionally respond (rather than react) to individual student needs (e.g., trauma, growth, learning, developmental) in a relationship focused and personalised manner.
- Grow student capacity through intentionally delivered social-emotional learning, side-by-side coaching, shared Growth Action Planning processes and through both implicit and explicit learning approaches.
- Empower educators to work together in shared intent (with families and students).
Students
To provide students high quality resources and content that is focused on:
- Foundational wellbeing and resilience skills.
- Social-emotional learning competencies and curriculum.
- Meta-cognitive and problem solving.
- How to work side-by-side with others in shared intent.
Actions ('How')
Summary Actions of the Partnership Journey
- St Francis de Sales have embedded the IMPACT Program in a manner that is mapped to the needs, context and desired outcomes of their community.
- Implementation underpinned by the Resilient IMPACT capacity building strategy.
- LBI Foundation Community Lead: David Kelly.
- LBI supported the staff team to co-design a locally owned wellbeing framework to empower the school to build a wellbeing-and-trauma responsive educational community from ground up. It was made practical through an intentional practice logic model.
- The focus has been on making this framework practical and stick in action through the IMPACT Program. All staff have been IMPACT Trained
- 12 staff members were trained to the IMPACT Coach (or Community Champion level).
- This has been supported by wrap-around coaching and embedding strategies focused on the “learn-it” to “apply-it”.
- The focus is on embedding the IMPACT content, including the IMPACT meta-cognitive skills, into the practice culture of the school community.
- Embedded coaching and advanced training.
- Maintenance and extension of embedding strategy, including through both implementation coaching and clinical coaching.
- Advanced training and embedding of content related to trauma and neurodivergence through the delivery of embedding and deepening modules.
- Local IMPACT Coaches delivering foundational IMPACT content.
