The National Bushfire Recovery Agency has a dedicated Families and individuals webpage that includes links to info on:

• Back to school, early education and care assistance
• Child Care Assistance
• Mental health support

The Department of Health's Bushfire information and support webpage has advice about how you can access the medical help and what extra services are being provided in response to the crisis, including distress counselling and mental health support for individuals, families and communities. Headspace centres in fire affected areas are being given extra funding to provide support and counselling for young people. 

DisasterAssist has information on financial assistance.

The Department of Education also has boosted services for students in bushfire communities, including mental health support in schools and childcare, and special consideration for university scholarships.

The New South Wales Department of Education (NSW DET) has set up a dedicated School safety webpage with links to resources on mental health support, including advice on supporting children, parents and colleagues through a bushfire crisis.

In Victoria, the Department of Education and Training also has a specific webpage on the 2020 bushfires, and a dedicated information page for parents and carers.

Farmers, scientists, doctors, religious leaders and parents, as well as former NSW Fire and Rescue commissioner Greg Mullins, will all be part of the first ever Australian Climate Consensus Forum in March. The summit, hastily organised in the wake the latest catastrophic bushfire season, will bring together leaders in a range of fields to outline actions that governments must 'undertake immediately to ensure the health, well-being, and prosperity of our children'.

You can read more about the summit in this Buzzfeed article that also features APC President Jenni Rickard.

We're delighted to have teamed up with Nutrition Australia to make a series of videos - Lunchbox hacks for busy parents - as part of Healthy Lunchbox Week for the start of the 2020 school year. The videos share some great ideas for getting the balance right, getting your kids involved and saving time on hectic mornings. If you like them please share them with your network....and please let us know if you want an answer to specific challenges you have.

We've added the first in the series here, you can see the rest on our YouTube channel, but here's a taster of the series - if you excuse the pun - to whet your appetite.

Healthy Lunchbox Week is an initiative of @NutritionAust to inspire parents and carers to create healthy lunchboxes children will enjoy. Check out their website for more info, ideas and recipes: https://www.healthylunchboxweek.org/

This is an excellent explanation of the process with advice for parents from Jaclyn Youhana Garver published by Lifehacker.

'Parenting a child with an identified learning disability is an exercise in frequent and sustained advocacy. And perhaps one of the most confusing things these parents will have to navigate is the IEP—or Individualised Education Program—process. That’s the specialised educational to-do list parents and schools create to make sure a child with a disability is receiving specialised instruction and making progress. The plan defines your child’s educational needs, goals and objectives. And creating it can be overwhelming and intimidating....

Let's help make the internet a safer place having a conversation with our kids about image-based abuse.

Did you know that 11% of the adult population in Australia have been the victim of image-based abuse? Most at risk are women aged between 18 to 24.

Image based abuse should be the most concerning issue for parents in 2020 right up alongside bullying. Why? Because image-based abuse is boundless for our kids. So much of their lives is lived through that screen in their hand, it is inescapable. And from little things, big things grow. A hysterically unflattering photo of your BFF posted by you that gets heaps of likes and comments can organically grow into something much more sinister.

And while so much of the advice we receive as parents is aimed at teaching our children to protect themselves often, we can forget to teach them how to not be the wrongdoer.

This lesson is just as important. This type of conversation with your kids should never be an accusation and it isn’t necessarily helpful after the fact. This is why is so vitally important to be having all of these difficult conversations along the way. None of us want to realise we are the parents of a perpetrator and haven’t corrected behaviour along the way.

So we need to be specific with our kids when having a conversation about kindness and make examples relevant to our children. Just this weekend after a social gathering at our place we noticed our teens and their friends had tremendous fun taking unflattering photos of each other and threatening to post them to Snapchat. This made us, as parents, realise how ingrained this type of behaviour is. They were all good kids hanging out in my lounge room. But there was an underlying meanness in their behaviour that they all thought was fun. We do all of the safety and self-protection talks but don’t have as many “but are you ever mean?” talks. We also usually talk about consent as a topic in terms of sex education not as a kindness and never as a “not being mean” context.

As I sit off to the side of the Insta culture, dabbling but not immersed, like our kids are, it is easy to see how we have got ourselves into his predicament! Life looks so amazingly carefree and easy on Insta.

If your children are on Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok or any social media really, I urge you to use safer internet day to take stock of the tools you are using to raise your caring and kind digital operator.

Do you audit their accounts together? Do you chat about the content they are posting and reading? Do you have rules around where devices can be used?  Do you role model kind digital citizenship?  Ask your kids if they think they are kind online.

Today, Safer Internet day is a great day to have a discussion with your kids about all the components that make up digital citizenship. I have been listening to the discussion on consent stimulated from the e-safety commissioner today. I urge you to think deeper on this topic. Because the question isn’t really “At what age should we ask our kids for permission to post a photo online?” The question is really “At what age should we start teaching our children about consent?” and "At what age should we start listening to our children when they exercise their right to consent and start to use it?"

If we all want a safer internet we all have to look at not just how not to be a victim, we have to teach ourselves and our kids, who are learning the ropes in all aspects of  life, how to use their judgement and to always be aware and to consider others.

If you need support in parenting a young person, who is much more savvy online than you, so much advice, support and information is available from www.esafety.gov.au/sid #eSafetySID. They even have a series of parent webinars this week - details below.

Jenni Rickard, APC President.

You'd be forgiven for feeling confused about what's going on in school funding. When we hear what's reported in the media we are confused too.

We keep hearing that non-government school students get more 'government' funding than their public school counterparts, but this is misleading.

The reality is that while they do get more federal funding, public students still get more overall. This is because under the current arrangements the feds mainly fund non-government students, and states and territories mainly fund public students.

And the system is actually designed to make sure public students get more overall funding. That's because where public students should get 100% of base funding, the maximum a 'like' non-government student gets is set at 80% of base funding. Additional funding comes from parent contributions.

It also turns out that Federal government funding of public school students has been rising faster than for non-government students.

The Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services on education, released last week, shows that Australian Government spending per student went up by 55 per cent over 10 years to 2018 compared to 43 per cent for non-government students.