NSW students were taught ‘resilience’. It didn’t help

A first-of-its-kind NSW Health study has revealed broad school resilience programs fail to improve the health habits of teenagers, making zero difference to fruit or vegetable consumption or how much they exercise.

Over the past decade, ensuring wellbeing has increasingly become the responsibility of schools, with students versed in psychological terminology amid worsening rates of adolescent mental health distress.

The study tracked more than 2000 public and Catholic high school students in NSW from year 7 to 10 in a bid to investigate how resilience education, which promoted the importance of self-esteem, might help students make positive choices.

“This is the first study globally to assess the impact of a school-based intervention targeting a broad range of individual and environmental resilience protective factors on adolescent physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake,” it said.

The federal government is spending half a billion dollars on wellbeing after giving schools across the country $203.7 million in 2023, as well as $307 million as part of a five-year National Student Wellbeing Program.

Participating schools were given resilience programs, $2000 in funding and a staff member to help roll out the program once a week. Students clocked up nine hours of resilience lessons on average per year.

At the end of the three years, there was no difference between schools in the program and those which had not participated and given the extra resources. Both groups reported similar quantities of fruit and vegetable consumption. The students at schools that did not run the resilience training programs did slightly more physical exercise.

“This study did not find evidence of an effect of a school resilience targeted program on healthy eating practices, physical activity, or resilience protective factors,” it said.

The authors noted the corresponding schools not given the programs to study might have ended up teaching similar ones anyway.

Resilience has become common parlance in schools as they increasingly attempt to cater to parental anxieties around adolescent mental health. Previous studies have showed mixed findings about their effectiveness.

A Monash University study which evaluated the effectiveness of The Resilience Project, used in more than 1000 Australian schools, found there was little difference between schools that ran the program and those that didn’t over three years. But students at schools which ran the program for six years had better mental health outcomes.

The NSW Department of Education has its own “student wellbeing external programs catalogue” which lists 26 commercially available companies to which schools can outsource resilience training.

NSW Secondary Principals’ Council president Denise Lofts said the physical education and health curriculum informed students about the importance of consuming healthy foods, noting wellbeing programs in schools were typically linked with better learning outcomes.

“To be a good learner, you need to be resilient. Most schools talk about resilience regarding things such as doing a maths problem. That’s where resilience comes in, it means keep trying and not going to give up,” Lofts said.

University of Melbourne Professor of Adolescent Health Susan Sawyer, who is also the director of the Centre for Adolescent Health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, said schools faced much higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders compared to previous generations.

“I think we need to appreciate that there is a heavy burden of depression and anxiety of common mental disorders that schools are grappling with,” she said.

However, she said while some other resilience programs had been proven to boost wellbeing outcomes, the broader understanding of resilience was also shifting.

What once might have been perceived as an individual’s capabilities, strengths and weaknesses now came to mean the resources that a family does or doesn’t have.

“For example, a family’s resources for empathy, for listening, the extent of broader family members that kids can connect with if they don’t particularly get on with mum or dad or an older sister. Beyond family, it’s obviously then schools and communities.”

Around the world, younger people have been experiencing worsening health outcomes from about 2010 onward while older adults remain comparatively stable.

In Australia, a paper published by the University of NSW this week said that worsening trend might have begun to turn around.

The analysis of Australian household data found the 2020-21 deterioration in mental health was largest among adolescents and young adults and that recovery by 2024 was partial, leaving youth mental health below pre-pandemic levels.

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