When Main Arm Upper Public School joined Living Ripples, it was not because the school lacked commitment to student wellbeing. Staff relationships were a genuine priority, and multiple social and emotional learning programs were already in place. What the school was missing was clarity – a way to move from instinct to evidence, and from data to targeted action.
Christian Tranberg, Principal, describes the school’s motivation plainly. “We’ve always felt like we’ve got students and parents that suffer from anxiety,” he says. “That’s probably increased over the last few years, especially since COVID. We were trying to gather data around that and see if we could identify particular groups where we could have the most impact.”
What the Data Revealed
After completing the Living Ripples Student Resilience Survey, Christian and a colleague attended a facilitated data review session with a Living Ripples facilitator. The experience reframed how the leadership team understood their student cohort.
Some findings confirmed what staff had already suspected. Others were more confronting. Year 3 and 4 girls were showing elevated indicators of anxiety and depression. Year 5 and 6 boys were reporting lower school engagement — and, significantly, many could not identify a trusted adult at school they felt able to turn to.
“There’s a strong focus on relationships at our school, especially between staff and students,” Christian explains. “So that was a big surprise to us.”
The facilitated session was central to making the data meaningful. “Having an expert interpret it made a massive difference,” he says. “There’s a tendency to personalise the data too much – to see it as a rating of how well your school is doing. But it’s there to look for areas where you can make improvements. Having someone help you make sense of it gives you a lot more confidence in the action you’re going to take.”
Targeted Programs, Not Broad Initiatives
Rather than responding with school-wide measures, the school used the data to direct existing resources more precisely.
The Got It program, delivered through NSW Health, was already running for Kindergarten to Year 2 students. It is a family-inclusive model – identifying students who need support, working with willing families, and training teachers to carry those lessons into their classrooms. Christian sees it as the most integrated approach to family engagement he has encountered. The survey data confirmed that Year 3 to 6 students deserved equivalent support.
The school’s response involved releasing senior teachers to sit in on Got It sessions with younger cohorts – using that as professional development to extend the program’s approach upward through the school. Alongside this, a staff member already trained in Rock and Water, a wellbeing and resilience program, was brought in to deliver targeted sessions for Year 3 to 6 students. Crucially, those sessions were structured separately for boys and girls, responding directly to the distinct patterns the data had surfaced.
The school also continues to run Second Steps, a social and emotional learning program that has been well received across year levels.
The Case for Guided Interpretation
Christian draws a clear distinction between the Living Ripples experience and the government-mandated wellbeing surveys his school has completed in the past.
“The school has too much data, if anything,” he says. “What we actually need is for it to become information – not just a huge bag of data that tends not to be analysed that closely, and doesn’t often tell us things we don’t already know. And it doesn’t come with action being taken from it. It just sits there.”
The Living Ripples process, by contrast, is structured to move from data to decision. The 90-minute facilitated session felt productive rather than onerous. “That hour and a half didn’t seem like it was taking a long time. It went quickly, it was informative, and it was well-structured.” His advice to other leaders who are hesitant to commit the time: bring a colleague. “Having a couple of people there looking at the data really helps – and it’s not just discussing data, it’s looking at areas you can make a change, which makes you feel confident in the end.”
Main Arm Upper Public School is still in the first year of its Living Ripples journey. But the foundations are in place: a leadership team willing to be challenged by what the data shows, programs now targeted to where the need is greatest, and a clearer understanding of which students had been quietly struggling beneath the surface.
