This paper explores schools' new role in promoting children's mental health, as a key focus for policy makers across the global north. An education policy analysis is conducted for England and Australia, two nations advocating a 'bottom-up' approach to mental health promotion, granting flexibility to schools and municipal authorities. Here it is…

"Fitnessgram"® is a digital platform designed to help physical education teachers measure, record, disseminate and analyse the results of school-based student fitness testing. Despite important questions about the ethics, educational value and costs of "Fitnessgram"®, it is now widely used in the United States and is spreading…

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised huge concerns for the mental health of an entire generation of children. But the pandemic may represent only the tip of a mental health iceberg -- an iceberg we have ignored for far too long. For the first time, "The State of the World's Children" examines the mental health of children and adolescents.…

This occasional paper is the seventh in a series on the National Quality Framework (NQF). It explores the quality of children's education and care services based on the socio-economic status of the area in which they are situated. The Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD) is…

This article revisits debates about inclusive education from the perspective of the "Keeping Connected" project, a qualitative longitudinal research project focusing on young people with health-related disrupted experiences of schooling. Drawing on findings from this project, three main arguments are advanced and illustrated in relation…

Adverse parenting practices, including child maltreatment, interfere with children's adjustment and life outcomes. In this article, Ronald Prinz describes the Triple P--Positive Parenting Program, designed to improve parenting population-wide. Prinz offers four main reasons to take a population approach. First, official records grossly…

Issue 4 of the Australian Council for Educational Research's (ACER's) "Policy Insights" series commences with a synthesis of publicly available data on school attendance by Indigenous Australians, highlighting areas of major risk. It explores Australian and international literature to develop an understanding of the risk factors and…

ACECQA has published the second in its series of occasional papers, analysing one of the most challenging quality areas -- Children's Health and Safety. Quality Area 2 addresses one of the primary objectives of the National Quality Framework -- to ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of children attending education and care services. The paper…

Using international data on child well-being and educational attainment, this article compares child well-being in the United States to member countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Multiple measures of child well-being are analyzed, such as material well-being (including poverty, unemployment, and income…

This occasional paper is the first in a series on the National Quality Framework (NQF). This paper offers detailed insights into education and care service quality ratings for Quality Area 1 -- Educational Program and Practice, which focuses on ensuring that educational program and practice is stimulating and engaging, enhances children's learning…

The aims of this study were to examine whether adolescent self-efficacy mediates the associations between parental control, perceptions of the importance of healthy nutrition for child health and barriers to buying fruits and vegetables and adolescent fruit consumption using a theoretically derived explanatory model. Data were drawn from a…

Over the past decade the issue of food and in particular, food consumed within schools has come to encapsulate a broad range of concerns regarding children and young people's health and wellbeing. In Australia, the UK and more recently the USA, attempts to ameliorate a range of public health concerns have provided the impetus for an unprecedented…

This report summarises evidence on progress towards the seven Closing the Gap targets agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), along with an analysis of the underlying key drivers of change. The COAG targets are set out in the National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA) between the Australian Government and the state and…

This paper critically analyzes a community collaborative approach for implementing Health and Physical Education (HPE) lessons within Gippsland primary schools (Victoria, Australia). The rural community collaborations reflected upon are embedded within the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) "School…

This paper reports on school readiness (SR) and its predictors in five- to six-year-old children from a prospective, longitudinal study of children from eight months to seven years (the Early Language in Victoria Study--ELVS). The ELVS children came from a representative sample of children recruited though the State Government Infant and Child…