Protecting and promoting the mental health of

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Compassionate-Schools-Sydney promoting Teacher Wellbeing
Compassionate Schools Melinda Phillips promoting Teacher Wellbeing

Mentally healthy school workplaces do not happen by chance.

Supporting school leaders to foster safe psychosocial systems and practices within their school culture starts with leaders themselves feeling safe and supported.  

Schools are unique workplaces, hosting communities of students, families, and staff. Leadership in contemporary schools is complex, multifaceted and evolving, with ongoing high demands in diverse and challenging contexts to support student learning. Within this environment, principals and leaders also value mentally healthy workplace conditions and outcomes for their staff, but don’t always have a plan.

Compassionate Schools offers a unique three pillar approach to supporting schools with workplace mental health.

  •  1 : 1 support (clinical, supervision, coaching)
  • Staff professional learning for mental health
  • Psych health & safety partnerships: Safe & Well
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Compassionate Schools

How we can help

Compassionate Schools is a Sydney-based workplace mental health consultancy for schools. Led by organisational psychologist and teacher Melinda Phillips, we are unique in that we span clinical expertise with school staff challenges, compliance expertise from our organisational psychology discipline, and staff wellbeing expertise from twenty-five years supporting schools.

Our paid services are simple: 1 : 1 support for principals, school leaders and other staff to support mental health challenges (clinicial), leader reflective practice (professional supervision), and planning for future wellbeing (wellbeing coaching); professional learning workshops supporting staff mental health for teams and schools; and psychosocial compliance partnerships for schools.

Our free services support schools with monthly mentally healthy workplace webinars, newsletters, and articles to share. We speak about school workplace psych health & safety on our socials, at conferences, on podcasts, in the media … and everywhere we can. Our vision is our call to action:

All Australian schools are mentally healthy workplaces.

ServicesInsights

1:1 Professional supervision

Are you a principal, wellbeing leader or school leader seeking regular professional supervision to support you in your role?
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School workshops for staff mental health

Are you looking for at-school professional learning for a team or your whole staff?
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Psych health & safety partnerships

Are you seeking kind, expert support with a complex issue or compliance context?
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Melinda-Phillips-Compassionate-Schools promoting Teacher Wellbeing

Who is Melinda

Melinda is an organisational psychologist and NESA accredited teacher, currently completing her PhD exploring personal and workplace factors shaping school staff wellbeing. Melinda has established her consultancy, Compassionate Schools to enable leaders to feel cared for, respected and valued as they aim to do well and be well at school.

Based on her published research around Australian school staff’s experience of traumatic stress following critical incidents, and her ongoing 1:1 support of principals and school staff, Melinda brings deep knowledge of how schools operate and combines this with an Australian evidence-based approach to supporting school leaders in their reflection, development and approaches to managing through change and adversity.

Melinda’s experience includes working with individuals (principals, school leaders, teachers), groups (leader networks, leadership teams, wellbeing teams) and schools (single and multiple schools),  to support, protect and promote mental health in times of change, challenge and loss in schools.

About Us

“We support school leaders as compassionate, expert partners for their own mental health and wellbeing, and in leading mentally healthy school workplaces.”

We’ve had the pleasure of partnering with the following organisations/conferences:

Note: due to privacy names of individual government, Catholic and independent schools not listed

IPPA World Congress

IPPA World Congress

NSW Education

NSW Education

Trauma Aware Education

Trauma Aware Education

Be You

Be You

Positive Education Schools Association

Positive Education Schools Association

New & Insights

Read All Insights
How do I respond to stress as a leader or team member?

How do I respond to stress as a leader or team member?

A classic stress model suggests that when we encounter a stressful situation, we most often interpret it as a challenge or a threat; and we also think through whether we have what we need to cope.

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Boosting school leader wellbeing: how might we best approach secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, and burnout?

Boosting school leader wellbeing: how might we best approach secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, and burnout?

Secondary traumatic stress symptoms may echo those of PTSD, and are a consequence of secondary trauma exposure. Awareness building, the use of ‘champions’, peer and supervisory support are helpful organisational strategies.

Read More »
Looking after teacher mental health

Looking after teacher mental health

On March 31st, data and reporting from the annual ACU Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey was released, and Assoc Prof Paul Kidson noted

Read More »
Free Guide

Principals and school leaders: create a workplace where staff thrive.


This free guide, “Reimagining Work in Schools”, explains how schools can get started with designing better work through job and team crafting to enhance staff collaboration, address workload issues, and contribute to building a positive workplace culture.

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