Virginia Primary School is located approximately 30km from the center of Adelaide. It currently has 400 students, and ranges from Reception to Year 7. In the future, this may be subjected to change as curriculum is moving Year 7 students into high schools, so it will then be a R – Year 6 Primary School.

“What’s the Buzz?”, “Play is the Way” and Kimochi Dolls are used at Virginia Primary as part of their initiative to promote wellbeing in their students. As they are school children, Jess reported that they have taken well to ‘understanding strategies through storytelling’ and often engage with the scenarios. Reflecting back on the ‘Wise Owl’, the children can relate to the characteristics being discussed and go forth. The school also has a wide range of books on wellbeing and have reported that the children like reading them too. Most importantly, the school also uses posimente, a wellbeing system that monitors the mental health and wellbeing of individuals via case management.

Jessica Nguyen works as the School Counsellor at Virginia Primary School, three days a week. The other two days, she continues that work at Salisbury High School, with a different demographic. When talking about the issues at Virginia Primary School, she talked about how it was difficult to get that one-on-one psychoeducation to the students, and that classroom settings did not help that. It can also be hard personalising the delivery, which is why large-scale initiatives can be good and bad. The relationships in this community are smaller and intimate, meaning that parents are more likely to pick up the phone and call, as opposed to lodging a form through posimente.

Being the first school to take posimente on board, Jess has detailed how much she believes in the wellbeing system and what it can achieve. Jess liked how it was able to present “measurable results” and was “easy to use”. In previous cases, Jess had said posimente was super helpful in keeping notes to jog memory, store safety plans for a student and follow up on interventions. If something serious were to happen, she also mentioned that it was a good way to store information for legal reasons as well – keeping schools accountable for the actions they have and have not made to help the student. “Wellbeing is important wide-scale, and posimente is an investment in good mental health,” Jessica claims.