In 2019, Foundation House published ‘School is where you need to be equal and learn: Insights from students of refugee backgrounds on learning and engagement in Victorian Secondary Schools’. This project was designed to identify barriers and facilitators for learning and engagement from student perspectives, as well as student-derived strategies in areas such as learning, peer and teacher relationships, multiple pressures around settlement and mental health supports and strategies. The foundation of this paper lay in Foundation House’s Trauma Recovery Framework, which acknowledges the importance of reestablishing meaning, identity, and future as a recovery goal for survivors of refugee trauma. For those survivors at adolescent age, being able to advocate for and on behalf of their fellow new arrival peers has been a well-documented strategy to support recovery, meaning making and a sense of justice.
An iteration of these focus groups was piloted with Craigieburn Secondary College at the end of 2019 where outcomes of the pilot indicated the importance of student-led opportunities to advocate for their peers as a form of recovery to support their settlement. The development and success of the above initiatives has influenced how student consultations are facilitated and coordinated with schools participating in the Refugee Education Support Program (RESP).
An extension of this has been Foundation House’s Education & Early Years team and Child Youth and Families Counselling programs co-designing/facilitating a student voice/managing difficult emotions integrated program with secondary schools who have participated in RESP. This program was inspired by the unique position of schools to support recovery, build resilience, and the need to help students from refugee backgrounds to feel safe to explore themes associated with their refugee journey and how to manage their mental health and wellbeing at home and at school while adjusting to a new learning environment.
The program takes a strengths-based approach to student voice and advocacy, introducing the participants as ‘student experts’, giving them the chance to influence and improve school and student experience for newly arrived refugee and refugee-like background students. This process creates safe and trusting environments to allow students to investigate and support how they can self-regulate and develop skills to manage difficult emotions associated with their refugee experience and resettlement in a new country.
This presentation explores some of the process and outcomes of the student voice/managing difficult emotions sessions, and what learnings and successes have come from taking an integrated approach.

Background
This workshop will explore issues of diversity, cultural and linguistic pride and safety, and intercultural understanding through a trauma responsive lens. Emma and Paul are child-centred will draw a focus to the strengths of young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds and their capacity for peer support.

In 2024 the Adelaide Secondary School of English (ASSoE) started enrolling refugees from war-inflicted Gaza, raising questions about how the school could help these young people feel proud of themselves and their culture, despite negativity in the wider community and media. Since borders were closed during covid times, the school grew very rapidly as larger numbers of migrants and refugee for many countries have been able to settle in Adelaide, albeit amidst a traumatising housing crisis. With their colleagues, Paul and Emma saw a strong need to empower students in their first language, and to the harness strength and resilience of student’s experiences and nurture cultural pride to support a sense of belonging and safety in successive waves of newcomers.

With a strong commitment to participant co-design, a team of ASSoE teachers worked with students, staff, the Survivors of Torture and Trauma Assistance and Rehabilitation Service (STTARS) and Peer Mentoring Australia to develop a peer mentoring project. The project aimed to promote belonging and inclusion in the school community and supports students to support their peers with help-seeking and coregulation practice, conflict resolution and practical support with settlement challenges. It also fosters cultural and linguistic pride and safety alongside intercultural understanding and harmony.

The Workshop
Emma and Paul will share the approach and outcomes of collaborative developmental work creating and implementing this program in its very early stages. They will share insights about how to create programs in a responsive, child-centred way that affirm and celebrate cultural identity and resources.

In the workshop Emma and Paul will be asking participants to experience some of the learning activities from within the peer mentoring program, which include culturally sensitive and relevant forms of coregulation practice. We will also be asking participants to reflect critically on the unique cultural diversity of their own educational context to consider strengths and resources that can help build a sense of cultural safety and inclusion and a nurturing trauma-aware educational environment.

Many Australian children are coming to the educational environment with real experiences of trauma that are impacting their behaviour, relationships, learning and wellbeing. The Australian Childhood Maltreatment Study found that six out of 10 Australian adults have experienced at least one form of childhood maltreatment, and the Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing Child Protection Report continues to show increases in the number of substantiated cases of all forms of child abuse. In addition, poverty, displacement, discrimination, and the collective experience of COVID-19 Pandemic lockdowns have resulted in experiences of adversity impacting children, families, teachers, and the whole community. Teachers play an essential role in responding to the manifestation of trauma in education settings, and yet many lack the confidence and capabilities to do so. Teachers require trauma training to equip them with the relevant knowledge and skills needed to address the increased disruptions, fractured relationships, diminished engagement, and poor child outcomes associated with trauma in education. In addition, teachers need to develop strategies to support their own wellbeing, to avoid the stress, burnout and the retention issues currently facing the teaching workforce. Various acknowledgements of the relative importance of such training exist disparately across education sectors. However, it remains unclear what type of deliberate, systematic trauma training and support should be in place for pre-service and practicing teachers. This research project aimed to investigate trauma training using semi-structured interviews within a case study methodological approach to gain rich insights that would reveal the lived experiences of teacher training and inform the development and delivery of effective trauma training that is needed for both pre-service and practicing teachers in early childhood education. A total of eight practicing teachers and four pre-service teachers participated in these interviews, with findings drawn from thematic analysis. This presentation will present and discuss the implications of the findings and explore how innovative and co-created models of trauma training can be used to develop and deliver effective trauma training that benefits children and teachers in early childhood education.