These schools wanted to give students hope. A landmark study shows they're on the right track

Sydney Morning Herald

17-05-2025

There are effective tools to improve young people's mental health, a new landmark study has found, but only with teachers, parents and school communities in it for the long haul.
An academic analysis of the Resilience Project's schools program, Australia's largest and one of its longest-running education mental health initiatives, has found clear benefits to the mental health and wellbeing of its young participants.
But the Monash University study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, also found it can take up to six years of immersion in the project's mix of gratitude, empathy, emotional literacy and mindfulness lessons for the full benefits to emerge.
Researcher Roshini Balasooriya, who is also a psychiatric registrar, told The Age there was no shortage of programs designed to tackle the mental health crisis confronting schools, but the evidence base of their efficacy was thin.
But by evaluating the results of the Resilience Project on more than 40,000 Australian high school students at 100 schools around the nation, Balasooriya's peer-reviewed study was able to shed more light on the efficacy of the program, which has been running since 2013 and is now implemented in 1150 schools.
She found students who took part in the Resilience Project for four to five years showed lower levels of depression than the study's control group.
By the time they got to their sixth year of the project, participants were reporting higher levels of life satisfaction and hope, displaying better coping skills, and showing a lot less anxiety and depression than their control group peers.
But students in the program for two to three years 'demonstrated no significant difference in outcomes compared with the control group'.
'When we looked at the schools that had invested for six years or longer, there were benefits across all five outcomes that we assessed,' Balasooriya said.