What is the Festival for Healthy Living?
The Festival for Healthy Living Program (FHL) is a collaborative strategy developed to promote mental health and emotional wellbeing in primary and secondary schools and their communities.
Supported by professional learning from the FHL Statewide Coordination Team, and a range of community-based services, the strategy is a creative opportunity for schools to review and develop their committment to student wellbeing policies and programs, and enables students to explore issues associated with mental health and emotional wellbeing. This exploration is achieved through a range of performing and visual arts workshop techniques. Students develop solution-focused performance pieces, artwork, multimedia and written work facilitated by their teachers in partnership with professional performing artists.
Why have a Festival?
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One in five children and adolescents experience mental health problems. Half of these show impaired schooling and social developments
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To remove stigma that can be associated with mental health
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Research has shown that the performing arts are an effective tool when working with children and adolescents to explore issues that underpin good mental health.
What's in it for Schools?
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The Festival for Healthy Living Program (FHL) provides support for improving teaching and learning in schools across schools and within clusters.
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The program not only fits the models for best practice in the development of Middle Years pedagogy, but it also fits all the requirements of the Public Health Framework. Research and program development in both education and public health have increasingly focused on the years of early adolescence as crucial in promoting engagement with learning and enhancing physical, social, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.1
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Independent evaluation has shown that the FHL Program is an instrument for change among staff and students involved, and it is an effective means of promoting mental health issues to students and the broader community.
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The FHL Program focuses on the transition between primary and secondary schools and it recognises the critical role teachers and parents can play in increasing mental health literacy in the school setting.
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Because the FHL Program promotes a whole school approach to wellbeing and mental health, it is designed to be sustainable for school communities.
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The FHL Program provides life long learning skills for students.
Key resources informing this model include:
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Gatehouse Project (2002)
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Health Promoting Schools in Action - A guide for schools (2000)
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National mental health publications
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MindMatters: A Mental Health Resource Kit for Secondary Schools (2001)
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National Framework for Rural and Remote Education (2001)
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National Safe Schools Framework (2003)
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Victorian Essential Learning Standards (2005)
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Victorian Government's Blueprint for Government Schools (2004)
1. Barratt, 1998: Cumming, 1996: Glover el al.1998: Hargreaves et al.1996:Hill and Russell, 1999 Resnick et al.
