Jonathan Joffe has spent his entire career working with and for the education sector. He’s seen plenty of policy moments come and go; he doesn’t think 2027 is one of them. Joffe wants education leaders to understand that wellbeing and inclusion requires the combination of good policy, coupled with clear processes, backed by a connected platform.
“The expectation has permanently shifted, and it isn’t shifting back,” Joffe, Managing Director, Australia at Tes, says. “Schools will be expected to not only have a policy, but act quickly, and demonstrate proactive support rather than be reactive”.
That’s the reality of Term 1 2027, when the National Framework's two-day response requirement takes effect. The uncomfortable part, Joffe warns, is that capacity isn’t arriving to meet that new demand.
Staff are already stretched, and inclusion pressures are a significant part of why. The answer must come from the process and infrastructure, rather than from asking teachers to absorb more.
“Preparation for the new policy requires schools to question their processes now in 2026, rather than waiting until these changes take effect in 2027”.
The gap between policy and practice
There’s a distinction between compliant and proactive, and it can be difficult to discern. Compliance is retroactive in its query: can we prove we responded? Proactive practice asks a more difficult question: could we have seen this coming, and how could we have provided a more effective response sooner?
On the ground, that might look like a low-level concern raised by a casual relief teacher on Monday morning being visible to the wellbeing lead that same morning, versus the same concern becoming visible only when it turns into an incident. At that point, everyone is responding rather than preventing. A school can be entirely compliant and still be blindsided, “because compliance is evidentiary while wellbeing is predictive and relational,” Joffe explains.
“The gap between those two approaches usually isn't care or competence,” he continues. “A policy is not a system, and most schools I visit have excellent policies sitting on top of fragile processes and disconnected data.”
That fragility shows up most clearly in reporting culture, where Joffe identifies three specific failure points. The first is friction. If reporting a concern takes eight minutes and three different systems, staff start triaging in their heads before they report — and that informal triage is exactly where things get lost.
The second is threshold uncertainty. Staff hold back low-level concerns because they are not sure the concern is serious enough to formally report. But low-level concerns are precisely the ones that reveal a pattern over time. Holding them back is how patterns stay invisible.
The third is silence. If a staff member reports something and never hears anything back, they learn not to bother. Feedback loops, Joffe says, are the most underrated part of reporting culture and the easiest to neglect.
When it comes to responsibility for addressing these pain points, leadership may set the tone, but messaging alone cannot build a reporting culture.
“The system must make the right behaviour easy. If it doesn’t, you're asking busy people to be heroic every single day — relying on committed and passionate individuals rather than a system you can rely on,” Joffe says. “And that isn't a plan.”
The data question schools aren’t asking
Right now, in most Australian schools, wellbeing and safeguarding sit in separate teams, with separate training, separate systems and often separate reporting lines. That isn’t the result of a deliberate educational design but rather how things have accumulated over time.
The cost is what Joffe calls pattern blindness. Most schools have plenty of data but lack a single view of it, which also costs them the ability to see change over time rather than a single static status. A drop in attendance, a change in friendship group, a dip in engagement and a wellbeing note are very often the same story but because of how things are structured, it’s a story told in four different places to four different people.
“Schools don’t usually miss the information,” Joffe says. “They miss the connection between pieces of information they already hold.”
Each signal looks minor on its own and significant in aggregate, but nobody is looking at the latter. The capability that is genuinely missing is trend detection — not whether a student is at risk today, but whether that risk has changed over the last six weeks. That’s a far more useful question, and almost impossible to answer when the underlying information is scattered across systems that don’t speak to each other.
Joffe stresses that any kind of information should trigger a human conversation, not make a determination about a child.
“Data doesn't keep children safe; people do,” he says. “What data does is buy those people time and point them in the right direction, which matters enormously when capacity is tight.”
When Tes conducted research for its Learning and Wellbeing in Schools Whitepaper, student and staff wellbeing came out ahead of academic outcomes as their number one priority. That ranking reflects a commitment that’s real and widely held. What Tes’ research also found, comparing the evidence base behind effective wellbeing work against the evidence base behind effective teaching, is that the overlap is substantial.
The clearest convergence point is relationships. Trusted relationships sit at the centre of every credible wellbeing framework, and they also rank among the highest-impact influences on learning. Joffe’s conclusion is that schools are not being asked to do two things. They’re being asked to do one thing well. That’s the key to where schools should look first as Term 1 2027 approaches.
“Where are Australian schools right now? Committed, but not necessarily structurally set up in the best way, allowing for the connection of wellbeing to teaching and learning, even to the point of having different senior leaders responsible for each,” he says. “Our view is that the separation of wellbeing data, learning support plans and student information in multiple systems is holding schools back from being able to see the whole child.”
This article was produced in partnership with Tes