The Project

Historical background and overview

In 1995, the Queen's Trust for Young Australians (now Foundation for Young Australians) approached the Centre for Adolescent Health to discuss how schools might play a part in:

promoting adolescent emotional well-being
preventing adverse health outcomes such as drug and alcohol use, depression and youth suicide.

In response, a multi-disciplinary team was established to develop, implement and evaluate the Gatehouse Project. The team reviewed existing research and drew evidence from public health, education, psychology and psychiatry. This suggested that a focus on promoting emotional well-being would have a positive effect on many outcomes, including substance use, self-harming behaviours, academic performance and school engagement. The team then focused on ways of promoting the emotional well-being of all students in a school setting. This contrasted markedly with many established approaches that sought to treat problem Girl behaviours after they had manifested.

The Gatehouse Project intervention was designed to make changes in the social and learning environments of the school as well as promoting change at the individual level. It provided schools with strategies to:

increase the connectedness of students to school
increase students' skills and knowledge for dealing with the everyday life challenges.

Rigorous evaluation of the work in schools demonstrated the potential to substantially reduce morbidity associated with the use of tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs by young people.

Importantly, the Gatehouse Project approach:

linked health and education
sat within existing health and education policy frameworks
built on the work schools were already doing
provided a strong, accessible framework and process which meet the needs of individual school communities
had measurable outcomes.

Beyond the 26 schools involved in the original research project, new partnerships with schools and other organisations have built on the Gatehouse Project. This has taken the theory and practice of the project to diverse settings, including work with schools systems, other health promotion projects and organisations in the health and education sectors. It has provided the opportunity to gather a rich understanding of both outcomes and factors influencing the implementation of the Gatehouse Project approach. From 2003, the work was developed through the Adolescent Health and Social Environments Project.

The Program

This section provides an outline of the underlying key elements and concepts of the Gatehouse Project and how these evidence-based ideas and theories have been implemented in schools.

The Research

Research was conducted in two very different ways. First, the team wanted to determine if the programs and strategies adopted by the participating schools had any measurable impact on the health and well-being of their students. Second, the process by which schools managed the concepts and changes brought about by participation in the Project needed to be observed and evaluated. These two approaches are detailed in the Research section.

Schools' Stories

Each of the Gatehouse intervention schools had a unique set of issues and experiences with the Project. Here, some participating schools tell stories of their experiences in the Gatehouse Project.

Choosing Strategies

This section provides some insight into how participating schools identified issues of concern and formulated plans to respond to these issues, then goes on to detail the three themes central to the Gatehouse Project: security, communication and positive regard.

Beyond Gatehouse

Finally, there was a need to make the knowledge and materials from the Gatehouse Project available to a broad spectrum of communities and organisations. This section outlines ways that the work of the Project was used and adapted beyond the original research trial.