How effective is the sub-school system?

By Margaret Liccup

Teenagers have issues. It’s common knowledge that adolescence is a pivotal moment in anyone's lives that is crucial for developing social and emotional habits for current and future mental well-being, meaning that schools have a major responsibility to aid with their students’ mental health. 

In the long 106 years that The University High School has been operating, staff and students have worked passionately to ensure that every students’ needs are met, usually with the guidance of sub-school. However, upon conversing with students across all year levels, there was a shocking amount of students that were unable or unwilling to get the aid they required. It seemed as if there was some systematic error within subschool that acted as the invisible hand, controlling this inefficiency. It led me to wonder — was this really the case? And if so, what could be improved?

In order to have a deeper understanding of this topic, I decided to interview a student about any concerns that they had regarding their mental health and their interactions with sub-school. A male student under the alias ‘Tony’, spoke to me about his experience with a particularly destructive classmate named ‘John’ . “He heavily disliked [my classmate], and one day [my classmate] was humming and John got really angry and decided to threaten him.” Tony says, recalling a past incident from several years ago. “We'd just returned from our classes, and were in the locker bay, putting away our things and all and he got extremely angry, and started screaming and getting into a fit of rage.” 

Tony says this isn’t the first time that an incident like this has happened. Despite his classmate’s destructive and ‘violent’ behavior, John was ‘never properly reprimanded’ leaving Tony and the rest of his class feeling disappointed and discarded. Tony and his class aren’t alone in this either. According to a survey I conducted across year levels, less than 40% of students said that they would definitely go to subschool if they had an issue while 42% of Year 12s said they do not feel comfortable talking to subschool about their problems as they are not familiar enough with their coordinators. A majority of these cases, especially with younger students, had the recurring theme of the rather opaque nature of sub-school's role in student wellbeing. These statistics and accounts are alarming. How would a school help its students if their students aren’t willing to be helped or don’t trust the school enough to help them.?

To get some answers, I tracked down Katherine Klopsteins, the head of Johnston sub-school for an interview regarding my concerns. Sitting down on one of the blue padded chairs in her office I asked her, “What actually is the actual role of sub-school?” Upon receiving this question, Ms. Klopsteins leaned back against her respective chair and gave a deep introspective hum. “There’s a lot we do in sub-school.” she said. “We’re responsible for a great deal of things from the administrative side such as student management — enrollments, transitions from other schools, attendance and more administrative things like subject selection and form groups. Another one of our responsibilities have to do with student wellbeing that ‘includes all health aspects — hopefully you remember this from Year 9 Health class — mental, physical, social, emotional, and even spiritual health.” According to the Johnston subschool leader, subschool helps students connect to the school and assists with medical certificates, school absences, counselling and psychologist referrals, and generally, student wellbeing. They also try to develop a subschool community through school carnivals, form group activities, assemblies amongst other things. As Ms. Klopsteins detailed the many duties of subschool, I found it concerning that so many people, especially in the younger year levels, were not aware of the function of such an essential part of The University High School.  ‘We repeat it every assembly but it just takes time for them to get it.’ Ms. Klopsteins says.

Moving forward, Ms. Klopsteins highlights the difficulty of fitting in extra mental-health sessions in students’ lives, considering sub-school’s busy schedule but she says that ‘there is definitely a lot to improve.’ For now, a lot remains to be improved but sub-school is trying their best to ‘keep innovating’ for a better future. We can only wait.