Digital technologies are increasingly embedded across and through children's lives: shaping learning, family life, friendships, play, health and growth. Whilst we can be excited about opportunities existing and emerging tech present to enhance child wellbeing, we must first ensure it’s fundamentally safe. And we are a long way from that right now. So how do we make sure we keep meeting children’s immediate needs, particularly so they stay safe and well, but at the same time work to ‘backfill’ the void in effective regulations and scaffolding to keep them safe? This session will show how the Alannah & Madeline Foundation tries to do this, and how children and young people are shaping the digital future they want. Spoiler alert – what it comes down to is the better tech gets at being tech, the better humans need to be at being human.

Despite decades of advocacy and reform, our communities continue to face complex challenges to their safety and wellbeing. This presentation will demonstrate why integrating lived experience is essential for designing effective responses and share practical insights into ethical co-design for child, family and community service organisations. This session will focus on embedding lived experience in policy, programs, services and governance as a strategy to accomplish meaningful systems change. Using Safe at Home as a case study, the panel will reflect on their learnings, including the importance of care, consideration and planning when embarking on co-design. This session is for leaders, practitioners, policy makers and sector partners working within the community services sector. Participants will gain practical insights into co-design that centres lived experience safely and ethically, including in lived experience governance. Attendees will leave with better understanding of the benefits of embedding victim survivors’ voices in the design and governance of policies, programs and services and how to collaborate with other organisations in pursuit of this. This presentation will embody Enduring Wisdom, Emerging Futures by combining long‑held knowledge from women with lived experience of homelessness and family violence with the perspectives of three speakers who played varied roles in co-designing and implementing Safe at Home. The panel will illustrate how co‑creating with victim‑survivors builds stronger, more responsive systems, honouring their lived experience in this area.

In complex and uncertain funding and service delivery environments leadership and practice must evolve to remain sustainable and effective. With increasing focus on both the persons' and staffs' rights, wellbeing and safety in schools and community services the need for effective rights-based responding is paramount for building resilient, and psychologically safe services that deliver meaningful outcomes. This presentation provides a real alternative to traditional approaches that are becoming increasingly limited and problematic in contemporary practice environments. It goes beyond ideas to offer an approach that includes strategies for responding and research-based evidence of effectiveness. The presentation identifies a critical issue for all services working with people with complex needs. It offers a new and effective approach which is largely unused yet can deliver meaning outcomes for safety and wellbeing for young people and adults alike. The issues, strategies and evidence are discussed in an applied way. Common barriers are also addressed to aid understanding and assist in effective implementation. Complex ideas are made practical and accessible in this presentation. on-Aversive Reactive Strategies (NARS) are described with examples and evidence of their efficacy for complex and risky behaviour. NARS resolve behavioural crisis without resorting to punishment or restrictive practices, thereby meeting legal, policy and ethical requirements. A range of NARS including needs-based responding are described for achieving safety. These 'first resort' crisis management techniques avoid 'rights compromising' last resort responses. This protects relationships, avoids risks of re-traumatisation, offers safety for the person, staff and other stakeholders. Concerns like the fear of 'making behaviour worse' are addressed through a holistic multi-element support context that upholds psychological safety for all involved.

This presentation offers an alternative conception of research-informed practice that challenges human-centred constructions amid escalating human-driven environmental degradation. Drawing on ecofeminist and ecojustice traditions, teaching practices are conceptualised as relational, storied, and ecologically situated (d’Eaubonne, 1999; Mies & Shiva, 2014). The paper examines how alternative ways of knowing are enacted within teacher education programs and curricula, while analysing the systemic and institutional constraints that privilege what counts as legitimate knowledge. The study is informed by ecofeminism, which identifies patriarchal domination as foundational to intertwined systems of social, ecological, and epistemic exploitation (d’Eaubonne, 1999; Fotaki & Pullen, 2024; Gain, 2025). Ecofeminist theory positions the subjugation of women and exploitation of nature as mutually reinforcing, while contemporary decolonial ecofeminism foregrounds diverse ontologies, worldviews, and more-than-human relationality (Gain, 2025; Jones, 2022; Siegel, 2024). Using an autoethnographic methodology, cultural storytelling serves as both method and analytic lens through which knowledge is represented, authorised, and enacted in education. The concepts of binary subjectivity, slow ontology, and hybridity are explored to illuminate the complexities of identity, belonging, and being. Cultural storytelling is positioned as an epistemic practice that renders lived experiences visible, intelligible, and legitimate, demonstrating how dominant knowledge paradigms can be challenged and culturally safe learning environments cultivated through recognition of diverse ways of knowing. The discussion considers implications for teacher education, arguing for greater recognition of lived experience and culturally situated knowledge as catalysts for transformative practice and social change.

This presentation explores how lived experience reveals critical gaps in the systems designed to ensure the safety and wellbeing of young people in an increasingly digital world. Through the stories of two children lost to suicide, we highlight how online harm, mental health, and system fragmentation intersect, impacting relationships, identity, and early intervention. This session is for educators, school leaders, wellbeing professionals, safeguarding leads, policymakers, and community organisations working with young people. Participants will gain deeper insight into how digital environments are shaping risk, along with practical strategies to recognise early warning signs, strengthen relational safety, and embed prevention-focused approaches. They will also leave with a clearer understanding of how to bridge gaps between systems to better support young people before crisis occurs. It matters now because digital environments are evolving faster than our systems can respond. Without coordinated, prevention-focused approaches that strengthen relational safety and emotional awareness, young people will continue to fall through the gaps, often before warning signs are recognised or acted upon. This presentation centres lived experience as critical evidence to inform safer, more responsive systems. Through our children’s stories, we offer enduring insights into how harm occurs across digital, social, and systemic contexts, and where current approaches fall short.

Every day, students receive messages about who they are, where they belong, and what they are capable of becoming. Some of these messages expand possibility. Others quietly narrow it. As educators, we know that relationships, belonging and high expectations matter. Yet in an increasingly complex world shaped by social media, algorithms, artificial intelligence and online influence, students are navigating identity formation in ways previous generations never experienced. This practical and thought-provoking session explores how narratives shape student identity, wellbeing, engagement and belonging. Drawing on contemporary research in identity development, trauma-aware practice, bias and digital influence, Jeremy Kalbstein introduces two original frameworks: the Narrative Impact Cycle™ and the Interrupt–Reframe–Reinforce Classroom Model™. Through a compelling student case study, participants will examine how assumptions, stereotypes and repeated messages can become self-fulfilling narratives that influence behaviour, confidence and learning outcomes. They will also explore how these same mechanisms can be amplified through digital environments and emerging technologies. Most importantly, participants will leave with practical strategies to identify limiting narratives, foster identity safety, strengthen belonging, and create classroom cultures that help every student see themselves as capable, valued and connected. In a time of rapid change, this session invites educators to draw upon the enduring wisdom of human relationships while co-creating futures where all students can thrive.

For anyone whose work asks them to keep finding their voice, and to keep going. Conflict is the daily weather of this work. We sit with families in crisis, carry impossible decisions, and have the hard conversations no one else will. Finding your voice in those moments is essential, and, done without care, can be very depleting. This is a hands-on workshop, not a talk. No death by PowerPoint. Drawing on more than a decade in the courts and over 1,500 mediations, Mary guides you through a practical, conversation-based approach to conflict that lets you speak honestly while staying grounded, boundaried, and whole. You’ll work through real scenarios, leave with language you can use on Monday morning, and come to see self-protection not as stepping back from conflict, but as how you show up within it

Youth advisory groups are everywhere — but are they actually working? Join YLab for a practical session on what genuine youth engagement looks like (and where it goes wrong), packed with real red flags, green flags, and a Victorian Government case study that moved beyond consultation into true co-design. Walk away with tools you can apply in your own organisation tomorrow.

Australia's student wellbeing data tells a concerning story. But it is not the only story, and it does not have to be every school's story. Drawing on wellbeing data collected across hundreds of schools over nearly five years, Pivot has identified a cohort consistently outperforming national trends in belonging, resilience and safety. This session asks the question their results demand: what are they doing differently? Rather than findings delivered from a stage, the session hands the microphone to the schools themselves. Using a situation, action and outcome framework, leaders will share what their data revealed, the deliberate changes they made, and what the numbers show now. This is enduring wisdom in practice: evidence and lived experience, side by side. Adam Inder weaves these stories into a single narrative, drawing out the common threads and grounding each one in what the evidence supports. Participants will leave able to recognise what deliberate, data-informed wellbeing practice looks like, and with practical starting points for their own settings. Most of all, they will leave knowing the national trajectory is not destiny. Schools can, and do, change the story for the children they serve.

This presentation focuses on how schools can better support students experiencing school refusal, disengagement, and relational breakdowns, particularly neurodivergent learners. With increasing complexity in student needs, traditional compliance-based approaches are often ineffective. This work matters now as educators are seeking practical, compassionate, and evidence-informed ways to create safe, inclusive environments that prioritise wellbeing, rebuild trust with families, and support sustainable student re-engagement.

Across every program Relationships Australia delivers — from children’s counselling and family dispute resolution to community connection and family violence services — one truth holds constant: children heal, grow and flourish through safe, consistent relationships. Drawing on Relationships Australia’s national practice experience, our Relationship Indicators research, and our work at the intersection of family law, domestic and family violence, and children’s mental health, this session explores what we know works and what is required of us as practitioners, leaders and policymakers. We will examine the relational pressures facing Australian families today, explore the evidence for child-centred and trauma-informed practice, and unpack the age-old saying: “it takes a village”. By weaving together lessons learned through service delivery and campaign work across the Relationships Australia Federation, Nick will unpack what it means to genuinely place children’s voices and wellbeing at the heart of systems, including the family law system, where overdue reform is now underway. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of why relationships are the primary mechanism of change for children affected by adversity, what child-inclusive practice looks like across diverse settings, and a practical call to action for co-creating systems, services and communities that are worthy of the children we serve.

In an age where young people are constantly online yet increasingly disconnected, this workshop invites educators to return to the foundations of wellbeing: genuine, meaningful connection. Together, we’ll explore how to help young people strengthen their connection to others, to community, and to self- three essential pillars that underpin resilience, belonging and emotional health. Through a mix of practical insights, real‑life examples, and engaging hands‑on activities, participants will experience strategies they can immediately use to foster stronger relationships and a deeper sense of belonging within their school communities. The workshop will also showcase how Kids Helpline’s virtual services- Kids Helpline, My Circle and Qwibbl- offer accessible pathways for young people to feel supported, understood and more connected in their everyday lives. Come ready to reflect, participate, and leave with a toolkit of activities designed to help young people feel seen, valued and genuinely connected. Happy to be guided by you, as to whether you think this is on the right track or not and change direction if need be.

Mentoring strengthens safety, wellbeing, relationships, and emotional intelligence by creating trust‑rich learning environments. It encourages open dialogue, reflective thinking, and supportive challenge, helping learners manage emotions, build resilience, and communicate effectively. Through consistent guidance and positive role‑modelling, mentoring deepens connection, reduces anxiety, and promotes respectful relationships. This nurturing climate empowers many learners to grow confidently and achieve best outcomes. This Case Study explores how mentoring can create a growth‑focused environment by combining clear expectations, supportive guidance, and gentle accountability. Approaches shared encourages individuals to explore strengths, confront limiting beliefs, and build confidence through structured reflection and practical skill development. By modelling trust, active listening, and constructive feedback, mentoring fosters psychological safety—allowing people to take risks, learn from mistakes, and stretch beyond comfort zones.

Drawing on two and a half years of community-based practice through KinHub, alongside lived experience as a late-identified neurodivergent parent, this session explores why so many young people struggle within systems ostensibly designed to support them. The presentation moves through three interconnected areas: the personal journey that led to the creation of KinHub; recurring themes emerging from working alongside neurodivergent and school-disengaged young people and families, including school distress, burnout, online immersion, unmet needs for belonging, competence and autonomy, and the overrepresentation of neurodivergent young people across mental health, out-of-home care and youth justice systems; and reflections on what these patterns ask us to consider for futures shaped by artificial intelligence, online culture and performance-driven systems. Central to the session is the proposition that many young people are not lacking capacity or motivation but are responding to environments increasingly disconnected from fundamental human needs.

Teenage boys are growing up in a complex world of online influence, social pressure, loneliness, gender expectations and mixed messages about what it means to be a man. Too often, conversations about boys swing between blame and rescue. This session offers a different pathway: engaging boys with honesty, high expectations and unconditional positive regard. Drawing on The Man Cave’s work with thousands of boys in schools across Australia, this presentation will explore what boys are telling us about mental health, friendship, help-seeking, masculinity, respect, emotional safety and the adults they trust. It will examine how healthy masculinity programs can strengthen child and youth safety and wellbeing by creating spaces where boys can reflect, build emotional literacy, challenge harmful norms and practise healthier ways of relating. The session connects with the conference theme by holding “enduring wisdom” alongside “emerging futures”: combining evidence, practice knowledge and boys’ lived experience with the urgent need to respond to the digital, relational and cultural realities shaping young people today. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of what is happening for teenage boys, why prevention matters, and practical insights they can take back into schools, services, families and communities.

Drawing on the Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS), this presentation provides an update on new analyses emerging since the release of the landmark 2023 findings. It will present key population-level data on the prevalence, co-occurrence, and cumulative burden of each of the forms of child maltreatment, alongside updated insights into the associations that child maltreatment and other adversities have with mental health, health-risk behaviours, and broader life outcomes. Particular attention will be given to patterns across the life course and the scale of impact at a population level. Using these data “snapshots,” the session will examine how high rates of childhood adversity are reshaping the contexts in which practitioners and services operate. The implications for workforce demand, system pressures, and service responses will be explored through a data-informed lens. The presentation will support participants to interpret and apply the latest evidence, strengthening capacity for trauma-informed, relational, and system-aware responses grounded in a clear understanding of prevalence, risk, and impact.

To be confirmed

Alternative education settings deliver learning support that is deeply relational and personalised. Student progress can be non-linear, and gains that look small on paper can represent significant transformation for a child or young person. Drawing on our work across diverse systems, we will share our observations of how settings and systems are currently measuring and understanding their impact We will highlight what is working well, as well as the common challenges and tensions in capturing meaningful progress Bringing our perspective as evaluators of a wide range of school programs, we will offer practical insights to support deeper, context-sensitive understanding of impact.

This presentation focuses on embedding emotion regulation as a shared, whole-site capability that shapes how staff and students respond in the moment, with impact on both self and others. Grounded in neuroscience and cognitive behavioural theory, staff build self-awareness, understand the developmental stages of adolescence, and their role in managing their emotions and co-regulating young people. Students are explicitly taught strategies to self-regulate, communicate, and use their agency to take responsibility. This matters now, where schools face increasing complexity in student wellbeing, behaviour, and diverse developmental and learning needs. It prepares young people for life at school and beyond, where strong regulation, communication, and relational capability support success.

Low attendance, disengagement and school refusal is the unfortunate reality for many students who are often enrolled in flexible education settings. By combining high expectations, personalised interventions and data monitoring, we believe consistent and improved attendance is foundational to student growth and transformation in all flexible education contexts. Our multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) attendance framework, launched in 2022, uses tiered interventions and data monitoring to ensure every student receives the right level of support. In one year, our attendance rose by 12.6%, equating to 1137 additional days of learning. By Term 3 in 2024, students averaged 70% attendance—the highest in our history. In early 2025, we reached a record 82% attendance, with Year 11 achieving 92%. Behind these numbers are stories of student growth - like Billy who with greater monitoring and individualised support improved attendance from 35% to over 70%, achieved his HSC, and left being employed and engaged at TAFE. It is about Peter who came to our school wanting to leave in Year 10, but with wrap-around support improved attendance to 95%, achieved his HSC, and attained a full-time mechanic apprenticeship.

This session deepens understanding of child trafficking and exploitation within the Australian context, drawing on current realities, practical insights, and the challenges we face in a rapidly changing environment. David explores current concerns in identifying children experiencing exploitation in Australia, how trafficking and child exploitation intersect, and how stereotypes can shape understanding and responses. Drawing on international learnings from ZOE’s restorative care work in Thailand, the session also highlights pathways to healing and recovery and how children and young people can be better supported. Grounded in evidence, on the ground experience, and practical case studies, this session equips participants to think critically, hold complexity, and strengthen responses that centre the safety, dignity, and care of vulnerable children.

Cultivating Respect Through Social and Emotional Literacy: We will workshop how language and interventions from Mental health First Aid delivered across a whole college community can establish norms and expectations centered on respect, empathy and understanding. By empowering students and staff to value themselves, we explore the ripple effect this has on their community. Participants will gain insights into practical approaches that build confidence, encourage exploration of new opportunities, and foster a sense of intrinsic value. Data-Informed Strategies for Developing Flourishing Learners: Drawing from our experience at a large secondary school with over 2500 students, we will demonstrate how data can drive effective practice in enhancing the capacity of both staff and students. Our approach integrates evidence, experience, to build mental health literacy and create resilient learning environments. Participants will learn actionable strategies to leverage wellbeing data across multiple campuses, enhancing social, emotional, and mental health literacy.

Why can’t we just feel whelmed? Not flooded. Not shut down. Not about to explode. Just… whelmed. For many young people, even mild discomfort can feel intolerable, pushing them outside their Window of Tolerance and into reactive states like fight, flight, or freeze. In these moments, distress becomes the driver, and behaviour often turns impulsive, disruptive, or withdrawn, affecting both learning and safety. We’ll explore the distress paradox, how efforts to avoid discomfort can actually amplify it, and how patterns of up- or downregulating behaviour become strategies to manage an internal world that feels overwhelming. That’s the function of distress tolerance. It doesn’t fix the feeling, but it gives students something to reach for in the feeling. A way to ground, distract, or steady themselves just enough to choose a better next move. This presentation equips educators with practical, psychologically informed tools to support students through moments of emotional intensity, responding in ways that reduce impulsive reactions and gently redirect emotional momentum, while preserving a sense of safety and flow in the classroom

This presentation focuses on Seeing the Need, a key finding from a constructivist grounded theory study of placement stability in statutory kinship care. Seeing the Need describes how family and kin come to recognise a child’s unmet need for care and make the decision to step forward. This matters now because systems continue to struggle to find and engage family for children on statutory orders, particularly those with complex needs. Applying this insight reframes family finding as a relational, emotionally intelligent process that strengthens safety, belonging, and long‑term wellbeing for children and young people.

The Ronald McDonald Learning Program is one of the programs offered by Ronald McDonald House Victoria and Tasmania and aims to help students from foundation to year 12, who have missed school due to a chronic health condition or serious illness, catch up on their learning. Whilst implementing this support through several different programs, an unmet need was identified for this cohort of students who experience mental health challenges as a result of their illness and subsequent absences from school. As a unique educational setting that provides onsite teaching at the North Fitzroy House as well as tutoring support in local communities across Victoria and Tasmania, the opportunity to pilot the Seasons for Growth Program was welcomed. Following the successful pilot, the teaching team is looking ahead to develop an online program to capture regional students as well as incorporating a parent program. Bridging the education gap for students that have missed school due to a chronic health condition or serious illness is at the core of the education services provided by The Ronald McDonald Learning Program, however the impact of illness on mental health for these students continues to be a burden. Introducing a pilot of the Seasons for Growth program in this unique educational setting has been pivotal in improving the wellbeing of identified students.

Relationships and Sexuality Education can be challenging for schools—but it becomes far more effective when parents and carers are actively engaged as partners in the learning journey. Justasec Education moves beyond simply informing parents to genuinely bringing them along. In this session, Jenny Wood shares the journey behind Justasec Education and its innovative approach to supporting schools, parents and carers through a Whole School Approach to RSE. Drawing on extensive consultation with diverse parent focus groups, Justasec developed evidence-informed resources that address parents' needs while aligning with the Australian Curriculum and school-based RSE programs. Jenny will explore the findings from pilot programs conducted in partner schools, highlighting how parents were actively involved in the development and implementation process. She will demonstrate how providing accessible, engaging resources can increase parents' knowledge, understanding and confidence to talk with their children about relationships, sexuality and wellbeing, creating greater consistency between home and school. Participants will gain practical insights into building parent engagement, and fostering a shared language across the school community. Participants will leave with practical strategies and a clear easily implemented roadmap for creating a shared language between home and school, strengthening trust, and supporting young people through consistent, collaborative messages about relationships, wellbeing and sexuality.