Purpose: Retention of early childhood teachers in Australia is a critical issue, particularly for new teachers. The demanding nature of new teachers' everyday work and high rates of stress and burnout have resulted in teachers leaving the sector. By designing a formal mentoring project, our aim was to support teachers to stay and flourish as…

Offensive behaviour towards school employees is widespread and involves a number of potentially harmful acts. There is evidence that school employees' experiences of offensive behaviour are shaped by demographic, role and school-based factors that mediate the likelihood of victimisation. However, very few studies have investigated the prevalence…

Extant studies of special education teacher wellbeing often focus on negative aspects, such as stress, burnout and the consequent attrition from teaching, the latter occurring with increasing frequency in the field of special education. In this article, the authors use the OECD teacher wellbeing framework to conceptualise special education teacher…

Purpose: To examine current practices and recommendations regarding clinical supervision from the perspective of Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) practitioners in Australia. Methods: A qualitative study design consisting of semi-structured interviews with 14 PBS practitioners. Results: Positive supervision experiences revealed the importance of…

Over the last 18 months, the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had dramatic implications for education systems across the globe. In Australia, state and territory governments have worked in consultation with one another and the federal government to respond to outbreaks. State-level policymakers have introduced the measures and…

The purpose of this study was to elaborate the knowledge of the supervising teacher as enacted through mentor-mentee conversations that occur during practicum. An interpretivist framework using Clarke et al.'s (2014) Categories of Participation was used to consider how supervising teacher knowledge manifests in mentoring conversations with the…

Central to this phenomenological inquiry is the question of how students' fundamental needs of belonging, trust and connection are enacted in arts classrooms. Through qualitative semi-structured interviews, this research explores the teaching practices of 23 expert arts teachers in Western Australian schools, revealing strategies to sustain…

Background: Supporting people with intellectual disability to make decisions is an important issue for policy implementation yet there is little evidence about the practice of providing support. Method: This study aimed to understand the experiences of family members and disability support workers in providing support to adults with intellectual…

Background: Little is known about networks for positive behaviour support (PBS) in disability services. This study explores a PBS network to identify influential persons in its promotion and communication. Methods: Quantitative sociometric methods were used to identify persons who occupy positions of either boundary spanning (those that link…

Digital citizenship and cyber safety are often used interchangeably in the context of young people's internet use, depicting the young person as passive, vulnerable and in need of adult intervention to navigate an unsafe online environment and perpetuating reductive and deterministic initiatives that rarely respond to young people's own online…

Relationships and sexual health education is an accepted part of the school curriculum to support adolescent development. In recent years, the nature of this education has expanded to include topics encompassing a social model of health (e.g. with a focus on gender roles). There has, however, been limited exploration of student views about the…

University spaces can be experienced as unfamiliar and anxiety-inducing by working-class students. Early difficulties adjusting to university can lead to attrition. This article draws from a larger study examining the experiences of first-in-family (FIF) girls in one Australian city as they transition from secondary school into their first year of…

Currently, there is limited empirically published Australian studies on effective rehabilitative programs in youth justice. This study used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the Healthy Relationships program which was designed to challenge attitudes relating to intimate partner violence for male adolescents in detention in Western Australia.…

Everyone feels lonely some of the time. However, chronic loneliness can impair learning, affect physical and mental health, and is even linked to early death. Loneliness is thus not only a personal matter; it is a public health concern. Schools provide spaces and opportunities for friendships. By bringing together students from different…

This qualitative study aimed to investigate enablers and barriers facing community-playgroup families in the provision of play opportunities for children throughout periods of lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study used a capabilities approach, focussing specifically on the concepts of resources, capabilities and…