Educators are exhausted. Why wouldn’t they be? They are carrying a lot – learning outcomes, curriculum demands, behavioural challenges, family needs, and complex wellbeing issues – often without enough of the resources or systemic support they need.

They are being asked to do more with less, and it’s unsustainable. This is a problem for all of us. When our schools and early childhood systems struggle, so will our children, and so will the communities around them. The cycle feeds itself: When families are struggling, children will struggle, and schools will inherit the effects of this – which will make it harder for schools to give children the support they need, which will see children and families struggle.

There is a beautiful African proverb. It speaks to trauma, but the more I think about it, the more I think it is relevant for all of us. It says, ‘When a child does not feel embraced by the warmth of the village, that child will burn the village down to feel its warmth.‘

We have a lot of children burning the village down, and our educators are on the front line. They are both the target of the problem and the solution. It’s so hard to be both, especially with limited resources.

This isn’t necessarily about the quality of schools or early childhood centres, although sometimes it can be. When the workload and the pressure is unsustainable, good people leave the profession. When there isn’t enough people to fill the gaps, the bar lowers. We have professionals who shouldn’t be there, or who aren’t ready to be there because they are ‘working towards’ qualifications and have been given responsibilities too soon.

The problem is the available resources, the quality of those resources, the relative value we put on those resources (pay, training), and the demand for those resources.

Think of it like this: They have three bananas …

Imagine that every day, each educator is given three bananas to feed every child in their care. Some days three bananas will be enough. Some days it won’t. Whether those bananas are enough will depend on a number of factors, many of which will be outside the control of the school, the early childhood centre, or the teacher.

It will depend on what children ate – or didn’t eat – at home and how hungry they are when they arrive.

It will depend on how much the other children need. Some days, one child might need all the bananas, leaving nothing for anyone else.

It will depend on how well the teacher can read the needs of each child, how safe children feel to ask for a banana when they need it, and the teacher’s capacity to recognise that sometimes the children who push them and their bananas away the hardest are the hungriest children of all.

Some children will have learned that asking is dangerous, and that bananas are for the loved kids, and they are not one of those.

Some will be so hungry, they won’t be able to ask for their share of the bananas in a ‘socially acceptable’ way. So they’ll get none. Some schools might even move the bananas even further away, thinking it might fix the problem. It won’t. Instead, they’ll see everyone else getting their share of bananas, but their only experience, again and again, is that bananas aren’t meant for people like them. So they don’t ask nicely. They don’t ask at all. So tomorrow they’ll be hungrier. They’ll start to burn the village down because this is a useless, lonely village that provides plenty for everybody else and never enough for them. Eventually, they’ll just stay away. They know they won’t get what they need and even more importantly, they can’t stand who they are in this place – hungry, unseen, unchosen, unmattering, tolerated, ‘bad’. A village burner.

But here’s the thing. The village burners aren’t the problem. They are often diagnosed as having a problem, to make sense of why they are the problem, but they are not the problem. They are the truth tellers. The ones that speak of broken systems – family systems, school systems, community systems. They are diagnosed as ‘abnormal’, because when symptoms are lassoed into a label, it can help make sense of ‘abnormal behaviour’. But their abnormal behaviour already makes sense. Their behaviour is an understandable reaction to unbearable and extreme circumstances. And, ‘an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.’ (Viktor E. Frankl) 

The flow-on effects are profound – for better or for worse.

Strong and well-resourced early childhood and school sectors are not just education issues.

They are mental illness prevention.

They are crime prevention.

They give children steady ground to stand on and families stability, so the world doesn’t tip them into places too heavy to climb out of.

The research and data on this are clear. A strong education system is:

• Mental illness prevention. Research from over 139,000 young people aged 7-18 years found that:
  • Around 50% of all lifetime mental health conditions begin before the age of 14.
  • Nearly 40% of young Australians aged 16-24 experienced a mental health disorder in the previous year. This is up from 26% in 2007. So is the workload of our teachers.
  • More than 1 in 4 primary school students (27.4%) and 1 in 3 secondary school students (35.9%) report high depression, anxiety or both.
  • In year 3, students who had a diagnosed mental health condition were, on average, 7-11 months behind their peers. By year 9, this gap increased to an average of 1.5-3 years. The has flow-on effects on learning outcomes, behaviour, school engagement and completion, and employment, income, and productivity outcomes.
  • 1 in 4 primary school children report high rates of hopelessness.

• Crime prevention:
  • Children involved with the juvenile justice system are more likely to be disengaged from school.
  • School disengagement predicts a range of adverse outcomes, including serious delinquency, official offending, and substance misuse during adolescence and early adulthood.
• Economic Impact:
  • It costs significantly less to strengthen mental health and intervene in early childhood than it does to treat mental illness in adolescence and adulthood. One report found that in Australia, late intervention costs the government $15.2bn each year.
  • For every $1 invested in early childhood education, the return is $2-$4 through reduced healthcare, welfare, and justice costs, and increased workforce participation.
  • The economic benefits of childhood development programs have repeatedly been shown to outweigh the costs. In the United Kingdom, school-based social and emotional learning programs prevented conduct disorders, saving the government £150,000 for severe problems and £75,000 for mild problems (for each case prevented). 
  • In Australia, the return on investment of parenting programs for the prevention of childhood anxiety disorders was $2.40 for every $1 invested.

We know connection matters. The good news is that over half of primary school children feel strong support from a teacher who cares (57.2%) or encourages (52.9%). The room for growth, and the urgency, is that nearly half don’t. This gap matters. For a child, feeling unseen will make the world feel heavier, learning feel harder, and behaviour more out of their control, no matter how much they might try.

A child’s mental health is inseparably linked to their environment, and the relationships around them count as their environment.

A strong, well-resourced early childhood environment nurtures the cognitive, social, and emotional development of all children, but the greatest benefits are for vulnerable children. By providing strong support, we can significantly reduce the chances of these children being left behind. This ultimately has enormous long-term flow-on effects on learning outcomes, behaviour, school engagement and completion, and employment and income outcomes.

This is how we break generational patterns.

Schools and early education centres are already doing so much to support the wellbeing of young people. Teachers and other staff provide nearly 20% of students with informal support for behavioural and emotional problems, and 11.5% of students were supported by a school-based service in the last 12 months.

But there needs to be more.

The emphasis needs to be on supporting schools to expand their capacity to support children and families, not adding to the already exhaustive list of things we are asking them for.

How can we support the systems that support our children?

Children spend a huge amount of time at school. At the moment, there are vast differences between schools and between early childhood centres in the culture around mental health and wellbeing initiatives and their capacity to provide support for young people.

We can do better by:

• embedding mental health and wellbeing into everyday school life through:
  • open conversations, assemblies, projects, activities;
  • as part of the curriculum, prioritised alongside traditional academic subjects,
  • regular class time during which children discuss problems (school-related or otherwise) and the whole class offers support or tries to find a solution based on listening and understanding. This practice has increased empathy and student wellbeing in Danish schools.
  • more team tasks and shared projects where the outcome is not to dominate others but to support them.
• identify and prioritise student wellbeing as the precursor to learning, engagement, and regulation;
• reduced curriculum demands on teachers and students;
• actively promoting a sense of community to build belonging and connection as identified pillars to wellbeing;
• specific strategies to engage and support parents and carers in a wraparound approach when needed;
• protecting educator wellbeing with time, training, and resources;
• ensure educators have a level training that reflects the critical importance of the role;
• provide paid protected time for all educators to learn the impact of anxiety, depression, trauma and other conditions on learning and behaviour, and how to respond in ways that protect and heal;
• ensuring children can access timely, quality support when they need to;
• value our educators with appropriate pay.

All of this is going to take resources – yes – but the resources are being spent anyway on managing behaviour, and further down the line on the juvenile justice and mental health systems. The ambulance is at the bottom of the cliff. We need to put it at the top.

This is going to take a massive shift – in mindset, in policy, and in the way we value and support the adults who nurture our children. But it’s worth it. Actually, we don’t have a choice. Safe, strong, supportive communities can only start with children who feel safe, strong, and supported.