Attendance and Behaviour Are the Signals. What Are Schools Missing Before Them?
Five evidence-informed ways school leaders can re-engage students earlier The leadership question is not only “What happened?” but “What happened before?” Across Australian schools, two issues continue to dominate leadership conversations: attendance and behaviour. How do we improve attendance? How do we reduce disruption? How do we re-engage students who are becoming harder to reach? […]
Student Voice: The Evidence, the Myths and When It Becomes a Protective Factor
Schools are surrounded by data: attendance, behaviour, academic results, referrals and assessments. Most of it tells us what has already happened. The harder question, and often the one that determines what a school does next, is why. During a recent Life Skills GO webinar, Founder and CEO Nikki Bonus asked: “How do we really see […]
It’s Term 3. Stop Waiting for Your Life to Begin.
A reflection on educator wellbeing, presence, and the quiet cost of postponing our own lives. “Just make it to the holidays.” If you’re an educator, chances are you’ve had that conversation with yourself. I’ve certainly had it. After more than 25 years working alongside teachers, school leaders and education systems, I’ve come to realise that […]
Why Belonging Comes First: The Evidence Behind a Critical Driver of Educational Attainment
There is a framework that sits at the heart of everything Life Skills GO does: Belonging → Engagement → Attendance → Attainment. It is simple enough to fit on a slide. But its simplicity can obscure just how deeply grounded it is in research. For school leaders and classroom educators right now, this matters more than […]
The Essential Resource Australian Education has been missing.
Early visibility strengthens early intervention. Australian education has never lacked commitment to student success. Schools, educators, families, and governments have invested significantly in improving attendance, wellbeing, achievement, and engagement. Yet one challenge has remained remarkably difficult to solve: identifying disengagement early enough to change a young person’s trajectory. The issue has not been effort. It […]
The Personal Story Nikki Bonus, Our CEO, Has Carried Into Every Classroom
When Behaviour Is a Call for Connection I am not one to share my personal stories. And on the rare occasion that I do, they are usually sanitised. Neatly packaged. Made a little more palatable. Why? A little bit of embarrassment.A little bit of carried shame.And perhaps because, for a long time, I believed that […]
When Students Fall Through the Cracks, the Cost Is Carried by All of Us
We talk about equity in education as if access alone is enough. It is not. Every child has the right to an education — no matter where they live, what school they attend, what postcode they are born into, or what challenges they carry. But access to a classroom is not the same as access […]
Why Emotional Literacy and Self-Regulation Must Sit at the Heart of Behaviour Management
Across schools, behaviour is one of the most urgent and visible challenges facing educators. But too often, behaviour management is still approached as though behaviour is the problem itself, rather than a signal of something deeper. What if the real issue is not that children “won’t behave”, but that too many have never been explicitly […]
What if one of the strongest predictors of academic success is something many schools still treat as optional?
In schools, we talk often about academic outcomes. We talk about attendance. We talk about behaviour. We talk about engagement. We talk about results. But what if one of the strongest predictors of all of these is still too often treated as secondary? Belonging. Not as a slogan. Not as a poster on a wall. […]
The students we miss are not always the loudest
Why education needs to rethink how it identifies need, measures wellbeing, and acts early. There is a harder question education needs to ask more directly: if belonging matters so much, why are so many students still difficult to see early enough? School connectedness is associated with students feeling cared for, valued, and supported, and the […]