From No Way to See How Students Really Felt to a Whole-School Daily Habit: Bradfordville Public School’s First Year with Life Skills GO
Bradfordville Public School is a mid-size government primary school in Goulburn, New South Wales, around an hour from Canberra and two hours from Sydney. Around 320 students attend across 13 classes from Kindergarten to Year 6. The school trialled Life Skills GO in Term 4 and moved to a whole-school daily check-in from the start of the following year, embedding the platform inside School Bytes, the system every class already used to mark the roll.
By capturing student voice, belonging, emotional literacy and readiness to learn alongside attendance and behaviour, Life Skills GO helps Bradfordville staff see what may be sitting beneath a change in a child’s day, before it escalates. It surfaces role-relevant insights automatically, without adding to staff workload, so real-time information about how students are checking in can inform everything from a stage meeting to a phone call home.
The Story in 60 Seconds
A short summary for anyone short on time. Everything below goes deeper.
The Challenge
The school had behaviour data but no way to see how students actually felt, and its existing wellbeing program asked too much preparation time of staff.
What They Did
After a Term 4 trial, the school ran the check-in inside School Bytes at roll marking, and focused first on getting every student checking in every day.
What Changed
Check-in data now features in executive meetings and Learning and Support Team referrals, and students have helped choose around twelve emotion options.
Try This First
Start with one check-in a day, and teach the emotions before relying on the data.
Who Is Bradfordville Public School?
A government primary school in Goulburn, New South Wales, Bradfordville Public School serves a mid-size community of around 320 students from Kindergarten to Year 6, with numbers that shift a little from year to year, hovering between roughly 310 and 335.
Read more about the school
Bradfordville runs 13 classes and draws from a broad mix of socioeconomic backgrounds, including a high percentage of students experiencing disadvantage. Thirteen per cent of students identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and six per cent are students with English as an additional language or dialect. The school sits in a regional country town, not a farming district, with a strong culture of sport and the performing arts.
The school has built a deep bench of wellbeing supports over time, including a daily Breakfast Club, Positive Behaviour for Learning, a peer support program and a Kindergarten to Year 6 buddy system. Bradfordville has a higher than usual allocation of School Learning Support Officers, funded in part through equity funding, along with a behaviour intervention group and a school chaplain who runs targeted programs for individual students and groups a few days each week. A trained therapy dog also greets students at the school gate each morning and visits the behaviour intervention room and individual students throughout the day.
Starting With a Trial, Then Committing Whole School
Bradfordville trialled Life Skills GO in Term 4, after several years of feedback that its existing wellbeing program left real gaps, both in how much preparation lessons required of staff, and in what the school actually knew about how students were feeling and regulating.
The trial went well enough that the school moved to a full whole-school rollout at the start of the following year. Twelve months on, Life Skills GO is used as part of the daily roll-marking routine in every class, from Kindergarten through to Year 6.
Heather FlemingAssistant Principal, Inclusive Education“I always think everything is possible, and relationships are really key, relationships with students, with your other staff members, with families in particular. I think that’s the real key ingredient to ensuring students can succeed and thrive.
I think creativity as well, and being flexible, are the main areas. If you can create something in a different way and deliver it in a different way, you’re almost bound to engage students.”
Before Life Skills GO: Behaviour Data Without a Way to See How Students Actually Felt
For a few years before adopting Life Skills GO, Bradfordville had been using another wellbeing program. Staff feedback was consistent: lesson preparation took too much time, and the school still had no real way to see what may be sitting beneath a student’s behaviour.
Lessons That Asked Too Much of Staff
Teachers gave consistent feedback that the school’s existing wellbeing program required too much of their own time to prepare, needing staff to track down resources and put lessons together themselves rather than teach a ready-to-use lesson.
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Today, staff can open a curriculum-aligned lesson without that preparation, described by the Assistant Principal, Inclusive Education, as needing nothing more than getting out some journals and looking at the lesson beforehand.
Behaviour Data Without the Why
The school could see behaviour incidents, but not what may be sitting beneath them. There was no way to capture a student’s emotions, their ability to self-regulate, or how they actually felt about coming to school, a genuine gap in an otherwise considered wellbeing practice.
No Way to See a Trend Day to Day
Observation and behaviour records could show what had already happened, but not whether a pattern was building over a week or a term, or whether an off day for one student was part of something bigger.
Heather FlemingAssistant Principal, Inclusive Education“We had been using another program for a few years and we had a lot of feedback to say that the lesson preparation was not good, and it required too much of staff to actually find the resources and get everything together. There was also the fact we didn’t have data on what was actually happening. You can have behaviour data, that’s one thing, but we didn’t have a lot about the student’s emotions and their ability to regulate and how they actually feel about coming to school. So that was a real key that was missing from our current practice and programs.”
Building Buy-In: Start Small and Get the Check-In Habit Right First
The question other schools often ask Bradfordville is how staff took to a daily check-in so quickly. Part of the answer is that the school followed Life Skills GO’s own implementation advice closely, rather than trying to do everything at once.
Read the full buy-in story
Staff take-up was helped by the fact the check-in sat inside School Bytes, the system already used to mark the roll each morning, so there was no new administrative step to learn.
It was not instant. In the first term, check-ins were something of a novelty, and Bradfordville does not believe that early data was as accurate as it later became. Staff had to build trust in the process before the information could be relied on.
The school followed Life Skills GO’s recommendation not to push straight into weekly lessons. Instead, the early focus stayed on one thing: getting every student checking in every day. That patience revealed early that many students were not yet very emotionally literate, and that teaching around emotions needed to come first before the data could be trusted.
Follow the implementation guide
Trust the recommended sequence: get every student checking in daily before trying to teach the full lesson program.
Fit it inside the system staff already use
Run the check-in through School Bytes so it is completed as part of marking the roll, not as an extra task.
Expect a settling-in period
Treat the first term as building trust in the data, not as the finished picture.
Make the reports part of the meetings you already run
Midterm and end-of-term check-in data now feature in executive meetings, and check-in history is one of the first things reviewed whenever a student is referred to the Learning and Support Team.
Read more
Among the available reports, the stage report has become a favourite, showing individual students and their percentage of check-ins within each emotion category over a period of time.
Embedding the same habit into stage team meetings, week to week rather than only term to term, is a stated goal for the year ahead.
Let students help shape the check-in
Year 2 students suggested adding the emotion “energised” by the end of Term 1. By Term 2, each stage had broadened its set to around ten to twelve emotion options, chosen with student input.
Keep questioning what you actually want to know
Encourage every stage leader, teacher and the principal to ask what they specifically want the data to tell them, rather than looking at it without a question in mind.
Heather FlemingAssistant Principal, Inclusive Education“Staff took on the check-in really quickly. That was easy because it linked in with our roll on School Bytes, and we had always speculated things about what we thought was happening, but I guess until we started delving into it, then more was revealed through those check-ins.”
Embedding It: Get the Data Accurate, Then Build
Twelve months in, embedding Life Skills GO at Bradfordville came from following a clear sequence, not from trying to do everything in the first week.
Start With the Check-In, Not the Lessons
In the first term, the school did not focus on teaching the core emotional literacy lessons every week. The recommendation from Life Skills GO was to get the check-in habit right first, so that is where all the early attention went.
Building Trust in the Data
It took most of a term for check-in data to feel reliable. In the early weeks, checking in was something of a novelty, and the Assistant Principal, Inclusive Education, is candid that the data was not yet as accurate as it later became.
Make It Part of the Routine
The check-in sits inside School Bytes, the system every teacher already uses to mark the roll, so there is no extra administrative step. Staff access it either on their phone or on a laptop within the first ten minutes of the day, and if it is missed in that window, staff are encouraged to come back to it once they get a chance.
The Team Reviews What the Data Reveals
Within the inclusive education team, staff allocated to different classes review check-ins specifically to identify students checking in as overloaded, or in what Bradfordville calls the “red zone”, following up directly with a student and documenting what they learn inside the system.
Protect the Consistency
The relevant staff need access set up to the classes they support, so the habit does not depend on any one person remembering.
Heather FlemingAssistant Principal, Inclusive Education“I find it quite hard, because I’m often onto the next thing straight away in the morning, and I don’t always get a chance to look at the whole school data. But now I’ve sort of outsourced that, because I’m only one person. It’s more helpful if the team can access that and check in with their specific classes.”
Every Student Known: A Year of Change
The shift at Bradfordville is best seen over the twelve months since the school moved to a daily, whole-school check-in built into the morning roll.
Before · 2024
- We had behaviour data, but nothing that showed us a student’s emotions or their ability to regulate.
- We had no consistent way to know how a student was feeling about coming to school each day.
- We relied on a wellbeing program that gave staff consistent feedback: lesson preparation took too much time and effort to put together.
- We could only see what had already happened, not a pattern building over days or weeks.
- Quiet students who were not showing obvious behaviour were easy to miss.
- Parent conversations about a child not wanting to come to school relied mostly on what a teacher had noticed, rather than what the child had said.
- We had no shared, whole-school language for talking about emotions.
- We could not easily see whether a wellbeing initiative was actually working.
- Individual staff held a lot of this knowledge in their own heads, rather than in a system the whole team could see.
- We had limited ability to plan for a student’s needs before the day had already gone wrong.
The Shift · A Daily Habit
- A daily check-in completed through School Bytes at the start of roll marking
- Six starting emotion categories, later broadened by each stage to a set of around ten to twelve, chosen with student input
- Check-ins reviewed by the inclusive education team to identify students checking in as overloaded or in the “red zone”
- Follow-up conversations documented directly within the system
- Midterm and end-of-term data reviewed in executive meetings, and student check-in data reviewed as a first step whenever a student is referred to the Learning and Support Team
- A stage report showing each student’s percentage of check-ins by emotion category over time
After · One Year On
- Wellbeing check-ins now happen daily, whole school, from Kindergarten to Year 6.
- Staff can see how a student is checking in over time, not just what a teacher happens to notice on a given day.
- Students are helping shape the check-in itself, having asked for more emotion options as their emotional vocabulary has grown.
- The inclusive education team can identify students checking in as overloaded and follow up directly, then document what they find.
- Executive meetings include midterm and end-of-term check-in data as a standing feature.
- Learning Support Team meetings start by looking at how a referred student has been checking in.
- Parent conversations can be grounded in what a student has actually reported, alongside what is happening at home.
- Staff have used a combined wellbeing, behaviour and attendance report to support a specific attendance conversation with a family.
- Students are becoming more emotionally literate, shown by their own requests to add and refine emotion categories.
- Staff describe becoming more curious, checking the data themselves before assuming what is behind a concern.
- The school’s existing wellbeing initiatives now sit alongside data that helps confirm whether they are working, rather than relying on instinct alone.
Heather FlemingAssistant Principal, Inclusive Education“I’ve triangulated before, so I’ve used it specifically the report where you can get the wellbeing, behaviour and attendance, and I used that for an attendance conversation. That was excellent in sharing with the student and the parent at the same time, to show the check-in is actually quite good, but is there something happening the day before when you’re having a day off. That was really a good moment.”
What They Can See Now That They Couldn’t Before
The change shows up at every level of the school: in how a child is supported, how a teacher runs a room, how a Learning and Support Team conversation begins, and how leadership plans. Here is what Life Skills GO made visible.
Now:
- A daily moment where every child is asked how they are, via a check-in built into the roll
- The chance to help choose the words used to describe how they feel, as older students have done as their emotional vocabulary has grown
- A visual, casual check-in in the infants classes, done via the interactive whiteboard so no student feels watched by their peers
- A pattern the inclusive education team can see if a student’s check-ins shift away from their normal baseline
“It revealed new information about students, and the biggest thing it revealed was that our students were not very emotionally literate, and we needed to do a little bit more work around teaching that.”
Heather Fleming, Assistant Principal, Inclusive EducationNow:
- A quick daily read on how their class is checking in, completed at the same time as marking the roll
- Confidence that check-ins are not extra work, since they sit inside School Bytes
- Early notice when something has changed, for example when a class had a different teacher for the day and check-ins showed who was unsettled by it
- A shared, growing vocabulary for emotions that students now use unprompted
“Staff took on the check-in really quickly. That was easy because it linked in with our roll on School Bytes.”
Heather Fleming, Assistant Principal, Inclusive EducationNow:
- Check-in data reviewed as one of the first steps whenever a student is referred
- Students checking in as overloaded, or in the school’s “red zone”, identified and followed up directly
- Conversations with a student documented within the system, building a fuller picture over time
- A stage report showing each student’s percentage of check-ins in each emotion category, described as one of the most useful reports available
“I love the stage report. I think it’s probably one of my favourites, because it shows individual students and, over that period of time, their percentage of check-ins within each emotion category. That reveals more to me, because I can see that a student is checking in around twenty per cent of the time in overload. What are we doing to address that?”
Heather Fleming, Assistant Principal, Inclusive EducationNow:
- A first port of call when a parent raises a concern: looking at how the student has actually been checking in
- A combined wellbeing, behaviour and attendance report used to ground a specific, sometimes difficult, conversation
- Midterm and end-of-term data reviewed as a feature of executive meetings
- A clear goal to embed weekly report reviews into stage team meetings, not only executive meetings
“Even when I’m on the phone to a parent, I can say, I’m just looking at their data and actually they’re checking in with happy every day. Let’s talk more about this, about what else might be happening, because the information I’m looking at here on the screen is not matching perhaps what is being said at home.”
Heather Fleming, Assistant Principal, Inclusive EducationGiving Every Student a Voice
Bradfordville’s check-in flexes across a wide range of need and confidence, from the casual, whole-of-class check-in used with the youngest students to the emotion vocabulary older students have helped shape themselves.
A Casual Check-In for the Youngest Students
In the infants classes, students still check in on the interactive whiteboard as they arrive, in a casual way that does not draw attention to any one child, more like marking the roll than singling anyone out.
The Day the Emotions List Wasn’t Enough
Towards the end of Term 1, some Year 2 students told their teacher that the six starting emotions were not enough. They said they always felt “energised” too, and wanted it added. The school took this as a sign that emotional literacy was growing, not a problem to manage.
Choosing Their Own Words
By Term 2, each stage had chosen its own broader set of around ten to twelve emotions, two per category, so a student could describe not just “happy” but “calm” or “proud”. The Assistant Principal, Inclusive Education, says this produced more accurate, more specific data.
A Word That Comes Out Unprompted
Students are increasingly using the language of the check-in without being asked to, describing not just how they feel but naming specific emotions as part of ordinary conversation.
More Empathy in the Room
Working with a small group of students with additional needs, the Assistant Principal, Inclusive Education, has seen more tolerance and understanding between students, alongside more empathy for one another as the school’s emotional vocabulary has grown.
A Different Kind of Parent Conversation
When a parent raises a concern that a child does not want to come to school, check-in data gives staff a starting point beyond what a teacher has noticed, opening a fuller conversation about what else may be happening at home.
“We started with just the six core emotions, and towards the end of term one, some of our year two students suggested that we always feel energised, we need energised in there. So we started, which to us says that their emotional literacy is growing.”Heather Fleming, Assistant Principal, Inclusive Education, Bradfordville Public School
What We Learned: Key Takeaways
What the Assistant Principal, Inclusive Education, would tell a school just starting its first year with Life Skills GO.
Start Small: One Check-In a Day
Get every student checking in once a day before trying to do anything more. Three times a week is easy, but daily quickly becomes the habit that makes the data worth trusting.
Teach the Foundational Lessons First
Make sure students understand the emotions being asked about, and that the reason for checking in is simple: because the school cares about them.
Expect an Adjustment Period
Do not expect fully accurate data from the very first weeks. Check-ins can feel like a novelty at first, and it takes a term or so of consistent use before the information can be trusted.
Keep Building on What Already Works
Layer Life Skills GO on top of the wellbeing initiatives already working, such as a strong peer support program or a school chaplain, rather than treating it as a replacement.
Ask What You Actually Want to Know
Before looking at the data, be clear about the question a classroom teacher, a stage leader, a wellbeing leader or a principal is actually trying to answer.
It Is Not Just a Data Tool
The goal was never to collect more information for its own sake. It was to support students more effectively and help them build the emotional literacy and self-regulation they will use well beyond school.
“Start small, have every student checking in once a day. Teach those foundational lessons about the emotions, and make sure kids understand that the whole purpose for doing this check-in is because we care about you. I think that’s the biggest advice I would stick with. And really focus on the wellbeing initiatives that you are already doing, that you know are working well, but just keep building on those, because quite often you’ll find that the data will reflect that those initiatives are actually successful.”
Bring Student Voice, Wellbeing and School Data Together All in One Place
Book a personalised conversation with a Life Skills GO education specialist. We will guide you through a short, interactive demonstration and show how the platform supports early identification, student voice, engagement and belonging, partnerships with families and carers, proactive intervention, staff decision-making and continuous whole-school improvement.
More about the demo, and reports
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Put the Reports Into the Meetings You Already Hold
At Bradfordville, the value of Life Skills GO was never just the check-in itself. It was what happened once staff started looking at the data together, in the meetings the school already ran.
Midterm and end-of-term data now feature in executive meetings, and check-in history is one of the first things the Learning and Support Team reviews when a student is referred. The school’s stage report, showing each student’s percentage of check-ins by emotion category over time, has become one of the most used tools in that process. Embedding the same habit into stage team meetings, week to week rather than term to term, is a stated goal for the year ahead.
Staff do not need to build their own reports or learn a new reporting system. The information is already organised around the questions a classroom teacher, a stage leader or a school leader is asking, so looking at it becomes part of an existing routine rather than an extra task.
Take These Ideas Further
Go deeper on the themes in Bradfordville’s story, from free expert guides on emotional literacy and disengagement to the wider Life Skills GO resource library.
Related Webinars
Bradfordville Public School’s Assistant Principal, Inclusive Education, spoke with Life Skills GO about building a data-informed, inclusive wellbeing culture.
Webinar: Building an Inclusive, Data-Informed Wellbeing Culture at Bradfordville Public School
FeaturingHeather Fleming, Assistant Principal, Inclusive Education, Bradfordville Public School
Watch the ReplayFree Guides & Expert Insights
Practical downloads for educators, leaders and families, including neuroscience-backed insight on emotions, learning and wellbeing.
Neuroscience of Emotions and Learning
FeaturingDr Mark Williams (Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience) with Nikki Bonus, on how emotions shape learning, grounded in brain research and Life Skills GO practice.
Get the Free ResourceWhy Students Disengage and What Helps Them Reconnect
FeaturingA practical guide from leading education, wellbeing and neuroscience experts, including Dr Mark Williams OAM, Professor Geoff Masters AO, Nikki Bonus and Karen Robertson.
Get the Free ResourceMore Guides & Resources
The full Life Skills GO resource library, including guides on whole-school wellbeing implementation, measurement and classroom practice.
Browse the Resource LibraryBook a personalised meeting with our education wellbeing specialist, to show you how Life Skills GO can help you achieve your school’s wellbeing goals. We will guide you through a short interactive demo and answer any questions to help you determine if Life Skills GO is right for your school.
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