We will explore how schools manage children and families with complex needs and the importance of systemic collaboration.
About this Event

In the early 2000's Australia changed its mind about locking people up as its primary strategy for managing mental illness, intellectual disability, autism, addiction, acquired brain injury, child abuse, dysregulated behaviour, and criminal behaviour. The Education system has absorbed this exodus of children, adolescents, and adults from the old institutions.

Schools are responsible for things that they have never had responsibility for in the past. Join us for a bower(schools) workshop, where we will explore how schools manage children and families with complex needs and the importance of collaboration with the education and health systems. We explore the recalibration between these systems, so they work together to benefit children and their families.

Bower(schools) endeavours to address the boundary between schools and the mental health, medical, child protection, justice, and disability systems over the highly complex matters most schools and teachers are now engaged with.

About the presenters

Malcolm Robinson

Malcolm is a Social Worker, Family Therapist and Mediator with fifty-three years clinical, therapeutic, dispute resolution, negotiation, clinical teaching, and management knowledge and skill working with people with high and complex needs; with fractured and fragmented families; with individuals and whole families corralled by multiple institutional service delivery systems. In child, adolescent and adult mental health, child protection, homelessness, education, addictions, industrial injury, acquired brain injury, disability, criminal justice, youth justice, and family law. He teaches Family Therapy and Systemic Practice and has held pivotal positions in family therapy, mental health, and homelessness. He was a key witness in the Royal Commission into the Institutional Abuse of Children. Malcolm has presented more than four hundred (400) conference papers, presentations, and workshops in Australia, New Zealand, UK, and USA.

Lisa Wolff

Lisa is the Manager of bower(schools). She is a qualified Teacher and Counsellor with 23 years of experience in Independent and State schools in Australia and the UK; as a Classroom Teacher, Special Education Teacher, Aboriginal Education Teacher, Social and Emotional Learning Coordinator, Pastoral Care Coordinator, and Student Counsellor for the past eleven (11) years. Lisa is seasoned in working with children and adults with high and complex needs, complex trauma, grief, loss, neurodivergence, learning difficulties and disabilities, addictions, poverty, and interpersonal difficulties. Lisa is passionate about social justice, fairness, equality, inclusion and creating spaces where collaboration is key in successful outcomes. As manager of bower(schools), Lisa works to equip school staff to transform their practices and reframe student behaviour, leading to a flourishing school culture.