WEBINAR: Utilising Wellbeing Evidence to Support Students Everyday

“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” – Herbert Spencer

There is an art and science to teaching, this is never more evident than in wellbeing programs. Every school has an approach to wellbeing, each one contextualised to meet the needs of their students. Student needs that ebb and flow, unlike literacy and numeracy, wellbeing doesn’t move smoothly along a progression of learning, instead it is variable. This constant shift in student needs, means that teachers and school leaders are constantly adjusting their strategies, responding to new circumstances, and managing resources to optimise every opportunity to ensure students are known, valued, and cared for.

Life Skills Group has been working in partnership with educators, communities, and families for over 15 years to meaningfully support student wellbeing. As part of our ongoing improvement journey, we are focused on evolving our offering so that teachers can spend more time teaching and leaders can spend more time leading. To this end, we have recently begun collaborating with Rydr Tracy, former Director Strategic Priorities at CESE, to co-design new features and displays that will do the heavy lifting of data analysis and data collection for you and your team. These features are co-designed by educators from a variety of socio-economic settings, a range of geographies including regional, rural, and remote, and a variety of school types including small schools and SSPs.

Data is just data. Data becomes evidence when it helps answer a question or test a claim. The working groups challenged us throughout the process to design a way to surface relevant and reliable evidence to empower them to make informed decisions, in real time, about wellbeing programs in their schools. This webinar focuses on these solutions and the way schools are already utilising this evidence to improve outcomes for their students. Specifically in this webinar we will focus on:

Enabling a whole school approach to supporting a ‘sense of belonging’
Demonstrating how to make informed decisions about resource allocation quickly and easily in real time.
Empowering student voice (relevant and reliable data collection with low effort and high yield).
Surfacing wellbeing insights about changes in school, class, stage, and individual student readiness to learn and emotional wellbeing.
Equipping teachers with the information they need about shifts, trends, and patterns in student emotions.
Practical advice on how to monitor and report on the impact of your current wellbeing programs.
Utilising technology to access easy to interpret and meaningful data about your students and school.

ABOUT OUR EXPERTS

Nikki Bonus is an experienced ed-tech founder and CEO of Life Skills Group, harnessing more than 20 years of deeply personal and professional experience in the development and delivery of social-emotional literacy programs for individuals, organizations, and most importantly, teachers and students. Nikki’s work has helped give voice to more than 850 schools, connecting with 20,000 teachers and 500,000 primary school children to build a continuing evidence base of what works to measure, report and implement real improvements in Social Emotional and Physical Literacy for school communities.

Rydr Tracy is a specialist in evidence-informed practice in educational innovation, with a career focus on strategic change that improves student outcomes. He draws on a rare blend of successful experience in schools, system leadership roles and industry practice – experience that has given him deep understanding of the complexities of the education sector from the classroom to the boardroom and a demonstrated capacity to generate practical recommendations that are grounded in context and evidence.

Core competencies

child development and learning
school leadership and system leadership
use of technology and contemporary pedagogy in teaching and learning
innovation, product design, program design and reform, particularly in educational settings
design, implementation and leadership of monitoring and evaluation systems
training and capacity building in evaluation
strategic stakeholder engagement

Qualifications

Master of Education (2017) University of Melbourne
Postgraduate Certificate in Gifted Education (2009) University of New South Wales
Bachelor of Education (2005) University of Wollongong

Selected experience from NSW Department of Education
Building on a successful 10 years in primary teaching, Rydr excelled in a series of corporate roles in the NSW Department of Education between 2015 and 2021. These culminated in elevation to Director of Strategic Priorities in the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation and then Director of Strategic Delivery – Learning Improvement. In these roles he worked effectively to embed evaluative practice as a systemic lever for change, redesigning school improvement processes, setting and monitoring school targets and generating a series of sustainable system reforms.

Selected work examples and achievements as Head of Educational Transformation at Creatable

Established an innovation and entrepreneurship curriculum for UNICEF Burundi. Phase one of this project generated significant positive results including improved life outcomes for vulnerable peoples living in the poorest nation on earth. This work is now in the process of scaling across East and West Africa.
Designed the education campaign for Correct the Internet, which is designed to raise awareness of bias in internet algorithms. This included running a not-for-profit campaign that provided education resources and lessons for teachers to foster compassion, imagination, influence and student empowerment.
Led a working group of industry leaders to establish a skills framework to bridge the gap between industry and schooling. This framework has the endorsement of industry and is supported by a suite of on demand, self-paced, NESA-accredited professional learning and implementation support for school leaders.
Invited to join the United Nations Global Education Platform Advisory Board.
In consultation with the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER), produced high level academic White Papers and rubrics and learning tools.
Produced an evidenced-based blog and podcast unpacking the case for educational transformation.
Collaborated with UNICEF on innovative education programs that focus on improving life outcomes for children in the world’s poorest countries.

Webinar:Utilising Wellbeing data Evidence to Support Students Everyday