Tessa Benveniste

• BMedSc, BPsychSc (Hons) PhD
• Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Central Queensland University Adelaide

By working in partnership with parents, school counsellors can assist in the early identification of mental health and wellbeing issues and facilitate timely access to professional support. However, very little is known about parents’ understanding of the role of school counsellors and the barriers and enablers influencing the relationship between...

Although social acceptance of same sex parenting in Australia has improved, prejudice toward same sex parented families still exists. Using the contact hypothesis as a theoretical framework, the aim of this mixed methods study was to investigate the influence that personal contact with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQ...

For many remote Aboriginal Australian students, periods of time during their secondary education are spent living away from home at a boarding school. While financial, political and community support is burgeoning for boarding models that provide scholarships, sports programs or accommodation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, very...

Boarding schools, by definition, house students in residence either on campus or close by in residential facilities - where the sleep environment is likely to differ from their home environment. For boarders, being in the boarding environment occurs alongside a convergence of psychosocial and physiological factors likely to impact adolescent sleep....

Many recent policy documents have outlined the challenges of delivering high-quality education in remote First Nations communities and proposed that boarding schools are one important solution. These documents have influenced the increasing uptake of boarding options and there has been considerable public investment in scholarships, residential fac...

Introduction In recent years, Australian government policies have promoted access to secondary education through boarding schools for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter respectfully termed Indigenous) students from remote communities. These students experience the poorest health of any Australian adolescent group. This exploratory stu...

Internationally, schools have recognised the need for supporting and improving the resilience of students, particularly those facing a multiplicity of challenges. However, social and emotional learning programmes, including those aimed at enhancing resilience, are often not evaluated thoroughly nor detail process and economic evaluations. This pape...

Internationally, schools have recognised the need for supporting and improving the resilience of students, particularly those facing a multiplicity of challenges. However, social and emotional learning programmes, including those aimed at enhancing resilience, are often not evaluated thoroughly nor detail process and economic evaluations. This pape...

Introduction: Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian adolescents from remote communities attend boarding schools, requiring integrated healthcare between home and schools. This study explored students' health status, healthcare service use and satisfaction. Methodology: A two-phased mixed-methods explanatory design was implemented...

Introduction: In adolescence (10-19 years), many health risks and protective factors that influence later life emerge. Remote-dwelling Indigenous adolescents have the poorest adolescent health outcomes in Australia, yet there is little documentation of their healthcare service use or satisfaction. This exploratory study investigates the perceptions...

Objective: This review analyses the available literature that underpins intersectoral service integration processes and tools designed to improve mental healthcare for Indigenous children. Method: 10 databases and 12 grey literature sources were searched for publications in English and published between 1 January 2008 and 31 December, 2017 that ev...

More than 4000 Indigenous Australian students enrol and take up a placement at boarding school each year. While reasons for attending boarding school vary, the impetus for many remote and very remote-dwelling students is restricted secondary educational opportunities in their home communities. A large multi-site study is being undertaken across Que...

Boarding schools have been increasingly championed in strategies to move closer to educational equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. However, there is a significant lack of research and evidence on the implications of the boarding environment for Aboriginal students, families and communities. This paper presents a study of an...

Education delivery and outcomes in remote Australia frequently feature in political, educational and research discourses. In particular, improving educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, who are largely achieving at lower levels than non-Indigenous, urban students, has been a priority for decades. Recently, boarding...

The 2014 Wilson review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory recommended boarding school models as the preferred secondary education option for very remote Aboriginal students. This study considers boarding uptake by Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of the Northern Territory. An examination of boarding programs a...

Increased focus and attention has been paid in recent years to providing remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students with access to high quality schooling opportunities. Often, this requires attendance at secondary schooling away from their hometowns or communities, through accessing boarding schools or residential programs. The stated in...

Since 2011 the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation’s (CRC-REP) Remote Education Systems (RES) project has investigated aspects of remote schooling with a view to uncovering ways that outcomes for remote students and their families could be improved. One of the key questions driving the research was ‘what is education for i...

After the 2014 Northern Territory Wilson Review of Indigenous education, the NT Department of Education committed resources support secondary aged students to take up boarding options. The basis for this was firstly, low retention rates of students to Year 12, and secondly, difficulties associated with providing quality secondary education in remot...

Increasingly, remote Aboriginal families are being encouraged to transition their children into boarding environments to complete secondary schooling. This comes largely from recent policy recommendations and implementation of a strategic plan to redistribute funding and resources away from secondary education provision in remote and very remote co...

Sleep is critical for the healthy development of children, yet most children simply don’t get enough. Whilst school based sleep education programs have been developed for parents and their children, they have had mixed success. We consider how existing school-based sleep education programs can be improved by applying a broader model to behaviour ch...

Remote Australian education remains complex. Boarding schools in regional or metropolitan areas have long been an option that provides remote students with access to opportunities available in a mainstream setting. Recently, media and policy focus on Indigenous boarding programs has increased dramatically, yet academic research on the experiences o...

Recent media and policy focus in remote Aboriginal education has turned to boarding schools. The general rhetoric is that boarding schools will allow Indigenous Australian students to have access to quality education and to learn to ‘walk in two worlds’. However, to date, there has been very little exploration of the lived experiences of Indigenous...

Despite numerous reviews, strategies and programs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students still have lower academic achievement levels than non-Indigenous Australian students (as measured by NAPLAN). Educational research suggests that parental involvement in their children’s education significantly contributes to improved academic, social,...