In 2015, the Department for Education in South Australia established the Social Work Incident Support Service (SWISS), to provide an enhanced and centralised critical incident response service to preschool and school communities. At the time of its’ establishment, the team of eight social workers within Student Support Services, was the only service of its kind in Australia. School Leaders and Education Directors now have direct access to a central duty-line operated 7 days a week including after-hours, which means timely advice on what to do following a critical or traumatic incident such as the death of a student, or a bushfire. The service provides timely, compassionate and evidence based on-site support to whole school communities, including psychological first-aid, and support schools with implementing response plans such as Suicide PostVention. The focus of SWISS is on the wellbeing of school communities’ supporting their return to normal levels of functioning for learning outcomes.
The service provides training to increase schools’ capacity in prevention and responding to incidents to minimise further impact. The SWISS role further mitigates risk and liability through a coordinated systems response, linking people in and across agencies such as School Operations, Employee Psychological Wellness, CAMHS and Headspace. The SWISS has responded to thousands of duty-line calls from over 1,500 in 2018 to over 2200 in 2023 including delivering hundreds of training sessions to schools, including remote locations. SWISS has an integral role in helping identify system gaps and areas for improvement and contributes to policy development.
SWISS has the responsibility for leading the post-vention response in the event of the tragic death of a young person, in all South Australian public schools. This includes assessing the impact with the site leader, providing scripts and letters to the school community, attending staff meetings, providing psychological first aid to affected students and meeting with parents in the context of support planning and referrals to community services, as well as providing proactive training for educators around managing self-harm and suicide ideation. Over 21% of calls from 2023 have been in relation to self harm and/or suicidal ideation. Critical to the success of this service is ongoing collaboration with interagency partners and other education jurisdictions to ensure timely and accurate information sharing, development of shared resources, a consistent and evidence informed approach.