Somewhere right now, a Year 9 student is sitting in a beanbag in a softly lit room because quadratic equations made him feel overwhelmed. Someone will record the visit as a wellbeing intervention, the relevant box will be ticked, and everyone involved will have acted with entirely decent intentions. The student was distressed, a teacher relieved that distress, and the system demonstrated action. Tomorrow, though, is another story. He may return to the class with temporary relief but slightly less confidence.
Before I continue, the obligatory qualification: there are students in our schools with disabilities, trauma histories, diagnosed psychological conditions and other genuine needs who require reasonable adjustments. For these students, accommodations are not indulgences; they may be the difference between participation and exclusion, and schools have both an ethical and legal obligation to provide them. What follows is not an argument against those adjustments, counselling, learning support, or the considerable work undertaken by teachers and allied professionals to help make our schools inclusive; quite the opposite. It is an argument about what happens when practices developed to address genuine need expand to encompass almost every experience of discomfort, frustration or reluctance.
Schools have become increasingly reluctant to distinguish between a student who cannot presently do something and one who does not want to experience what it feels like not to be able to do it… yet. They are also places where distinguishing distress from danger, anxiety from incapacity, and struggle from harm has become increasingly difficult. While these distinctions may not always be easy to draw, and teachers will not always get them right, abandoning them altogether is not a neutral response. When every uncomfortable feeling is treated as evidence for change or accommodation, we risk removing the experiences through which students develop competence, confidence and self-efficacy.
The central problem is simple. A student who is never permitted to struggle becomes less practised at struggle. When difficulty repeatedly results in escape, withdrawal or reduced expectations, students learn that discomfort is evidence that something has gone wrong. Difficulty becomes a warning signal, frustration becomes harm, and anxiety becomes a signal to seek safety. Schools then respond to the resulting anxiety by removing more difficulty. With each iteration, the problem deepens.
Immediate relief and long-term wellbeing are not the same thing. In fact, they may work in opposite directions. The clinical literature on anxiety has long recognised the role of avoidance: a feared activity produces anxiety, avoiding it produces relief, and that relief reinforces the belief that the activity was dangerous and avoidance was the correct response. Exposure-based approaches work not by pretending anxiety is absent, but by helping people encounter feared situations in ways that generate new learning about what they can tolerate and what will actually happen (Craske et al., 2014). This may not mean every anxious student should simply be told to get on with it, but it does indicate that schools should be cautious about treating avoidance as a neutral response.
More than a quarter of Australian students now receive an educational adjustment due to disability at school: 27% in 2025, up from 18% a decade earlier, with 36.3% of those students classified primarily in the social-emotional disability category (ACARA, 2025). The increase may mean schools are identifying needs they previously missed, or it may mean adjustment is increasingly becoming the default response to struggle. The answer is probably a combination of both, and counting adjustments does not tell us which.
There is support that gets a student through a difficulty, and there is support that gets a student around it. The two may use the same vocabulary, appear in the same plans and generate the same paperwork, but they are not educationally equivalent. One is intended to build independence. The other may make the support itself indispensable.
In education, support intended to build independence is usually described as scaffolding, and scaffolding, by definition, is temporary. Its purpose is to enable learners to complete something they could not yet complete independently, after which the support is gradually removed. No child is meant to swim in floaties forever, yet many school supports operate as such: once introduced, they are rarely reduced. Plans are reviewed to determine whether further accommodations are required, but rarely to consider whether an existing accommodation can now be withdrawn. The system knows how to add support; it has almost no appetite for removing it
That reluctance is understandable. Reducing an accommodation may be perceived as insensitive, particularly once the student, family and school have come to rely on it. Maintaining the arrangement is administratively safer, avoids conflict and allows the school to demonstrate that it has responded. It also produces evidence. A support intervention has a time, a place, a staff member and an entry in a management system. It can be counted, reported and graphed. The teacher who says, “Stay with it for another ten minutes; I know it is difficult, but you are closer than you think,” generates no documentation to audit.
There is no convenient field for recording that a teacher recognised a student was cognitively frustrated rather than unsafe, anxious but still capable, or struggling but coping. By remaining present and not over-intervening, the teacher may be doing some of the most important wellbeing work. The student may learn that difficulty can be tolerated, that an unpleasant feeling does not always require an immediate response, and that progress can begin at the moment they were convinced they would fail. None of this is easily measured, and schools tend to value what they can count.
When we measure only what we can count, logged interventions begin to stand in for wellbeing itself. An intervention log proves only that an intervention occurred, just as a wellbeing app proves somebody purchased a wellbeing app. An increase in referrals may indicate improved recognition of difficulty, greater available support, or it could simply mean excessive referral. The number alone means little. Meanwhile, students may be learning from the environment around them that cognitive discomfort is something to report or that uncertainty is evidence of incapacity, and not feeling confident is a reason not to proceed. We teach them that struggle is to be avoided and then express surprise when they retreat whenever they struggle.
Resilience cannot be built through a presentation, poster or app. Students do not become resilient by learning the definition of resilience. They become more resilient by doing things they once found difficult and discovering they survived. Confidence grows when students accumulate experiences of remaining with difficulty rather than escaping it. Not all struggle is productive, and not all failure teaches. Nevertheless, the possibility that difficulty might contribute to learning should not be especially controversial in an educational institution.
A serious approach to school wellbeing would mean class sizes small enough for teachers to notice when students are struggling before the situation becomes a crisis. It would mean enough psychologists and counsellors that schools were no longer forced to ration mental health support through perpetual triage, and access to evidence-supported interventions rather than programs that simply appropriate the language of evidence. It would also mean teachers having the time and organisational backing to hold students in cognitive difficulty without receiving an email demanding to know why the child was allowed to feel uncomfortable. This version of wellbeing is expensive because it requires time, expertise and professional trust – that pesky detail omitted from almost every educational reform.
The cheaper version requires a subscription fee and a login. Schools purchase a check-in platform, place a poster in the corridor, appoint a wellbeing coordinator with little or no time release and declare that wellbeing is everyone’s responsibility. The coordinator is then given an unmanageable portfolio and asked to demonstrate that student wellbeing is improving, preferably in a colour-coded dashboard, by the end of Term 3. The dashboard measures activities, referrals and participation because those are the available things to count. Whether students are becoming more capable of tolerating difficulty is a much harder question, so it is unlikely to be reported.
The promise schools should make is not that students will never feel uncomfortable, because comfort is neither the goal of education nor a reliable measure of wellbeing. Real wellbeing includes the confidence that you can survive being confused, disappointed, embarrassed or temporarily bad at something. It includes knowing that a difficult feeling can be acknowledged without always being obeyed, and that present incapacity does not have to become permanent incapacity. That confidence is available only through experience. It cannot be downloaded, displayed on a poster or issued alongside a beanbag.
The student who left mathematics because of quadratic equations will probably be fine, as most students eventually are. When he discovers that he can solve them, it will probably be because the teacher stayed with him while he worked through it. The teacher may have explained the concept differently, broken it into manageable parts, offered reassurance or simply insisted that he stick with it for another ten minutes. That intervention will have no log entry, will not appear in a dashboard and certainly won’t make the annual report. It may nevertheless be the most important wellbeing intervention the school provides.
We call it teaching. We’ve built an entire profession around it.
Maximising Student Potential 