As student wellbeing challenges continue to pile up in Australian schools, there is growing recognition that traditional measures of success don’t always tell the full story.
The Australian Education Union’s 2025 State of Our Schools survey highlights the growing challenge facing leaders, with 94% of Northern Territory principals reporting increasingly complex student needs driven largely by mental health and wellbeing concerns, while 92% of teachers said student behaviour had become more complex.
For young people experiencing trauma, homelessness, family instability or long-term disengagement, progress can look very different to attendance rates, test scores or ATAR results.
For some students, progress might be as simple as regularly turning up to school, trusting a teacher, making a friend or starting to believe they have a future worth working towards. Those milestones won't show up on an ATAR or NAPLAN report, but they can change a young person's life.
The progress data often misses
One leader who knows this better than most is Dr Jodie Long, who has spent much of her career working with some of the nation's most vulnerable young people. In June 2022, she was appointed Assistant Principal for Research and Advocacy at David Scott School in Frankston, Victoria.
The school specifically supports young people aged 15 to 19 in the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula region who have become disengaged from mainstream schooling as a result of complex personal challenges and significant barriers to education.
Dr Long says one of the strongest signs that a student who has experienced trauma, homelessness or long-term disengagement is getting back on track is when they begin talking more optimistically about their futures.
“Sometimes that is not a career plan; sometimes it is simply being able to imagine tomorrow, next week, or the next term,” Dr Long told The Educator. “Another sign is when they begin to see themselves as part of the school community, not just as someone attending it.”
A particularly powerful indicator of progress, Long said, is when students begin to feel they belong.
“When a young person who initially tested every boundary in the school starts telling new students to show respect to staff and peers because ‘that’s what we do here’, something significant has shifted,” she said. “They are experiencing belonging, identity and a shared obligation of care.”
Rethinking how schools define success
As schools work to lift academic outcomes while supporting students with increasingly complex needs, many leaders find themselves caught between two competing priorities. Dr Long said much of this tension stems from the way the education system measures success.
“The clash is most obvious in what principals are forced to measure and how the current system defines ‘success’,” Dr Long said. “What is measured by the system is what principals have to push staff to teach to, protect and value.”
Dr Long said schools need more rigorous and trusted ways to recognise the capabilities young people need to succeed, including resilience, adaptability, creativity, collaboration and problem-solving.
“Many DSS students have these capabilities in spades – and they are exactly what the world needs,” she said. “But outdated, inequitable measures, such as the ATAR and NAPLAN consume precious time, continue to narrow what counts and push increasing numbers of young people to the educational margins.”
Belonging comes before engagement
When asked what specialist schools understand about re-engaging young people that the broader education sector still hasn't fully grasped and could learn from, Dr Long pointed to the importance of creating the right conditions for students to reconnect with learning.
“Specialist schools understand that re-engagement is not a policy or an event; it is a carefully built process that takes time,” she said.
“Young people do not reconnect with learning because a timetable exists or because adults tell them education matters; they reconnect when school becomes predictable, relational, safer, relevant and meaningful enough to try again.”
However, that does not mean lowering expectations, Dr Long noted.
“In fact, it often means holding high expectations more deliberately, while building the conditions that allow students to meet them. The broader system could learn that behaviour, attendance and achievement are lag indicators,” she said.
“Once students feel that they belong, that staff see them as valued and capable learners, engagement can follow.”
The difference a second chance makes
Often, the most powerful intervention is not a program, but the refusal to let a young person believe that their education is less important than others, Dr Long said.
“Schools are under enormous pressure, and sometimes it can feel easier to suspend a young person at the centre of repeated incidents,” she said. “But what if home is not safe? What if that young person hears the message that they are not wanted, valued or seen for their capabilities at school?”
Dr Long said no teacher or school leader intentionally communicates this, but marginalised students can be hard-wired to look for this message in school staff actions.
“Small interventions matter when they keep the connection and relationship with school alive: an outreach visit when a student is unable to come onsite, a supported return, a genuine dialogical restorative conversation, or giving a student an opportunity to be trusted again,” she said.
“Students need to be taught how to repair after harm, and schools can create the conditions for them to return with dignity, agency and hope.”