About You: The Grade 5 Victorian Student Health and Wellbeing Survey

The About You survey assesses the health & wellbeing of young people in Victoria. It has been developed by the Department of Education and Training, and is being conducted by Colmar Brunton Research on behalf of the Department. This survey is part of the Victorian Child and Adolescent Monitoring System. The survey will be used across Victoria as a way of monitoring the health development, learning, safety and wellbeing of young people from 10-18 years of age in Victoria. It will also assist in the development of programs, resources and services aimed at meeting the needs of Young Victorians.

We are asking all grade 5 children to participate in the About You survey. We will visit Toorak primary school on Monday 1st August and survey all participating students in Year 5. The survey will be completed in class time as directed by the school via an online computer survey. The survey asks questions about young people’s thoughts and feelings regarding their school, family, friends, health, their experiences and about their community.

The survey data will be stored on a secure server that only the staff working on the project will have access to. The information will be non-identifiable. This means that the information is anonymous and will not have identifying information (such as your child’s name or contact details). While we will collect date of birth, once this has been used to calculate your child’s age in years and months, the actual date of birth will be removed from the data. The data from all schools combined will be used by the Victorian Department of Education and Training for reporting and publication purposes and to design and implement programs, projects and resources to target the needs of Young Victorians. Group data will be available in future State of Victoria’s Children reports, and on the VCAMS data portal published online by the Department of Education and Training.

Participation in this project is voluntary. If you do not wish your child to take part, you do not have to. However because the survey is anonymous, once your child has completed the survey we are unable to remove his or her survey from our project. If you do not want your child to do the survey please return the Refusal of Consent Form sent home this week before Monday 1st August. It is important that we receive the form before to visiting the school.

This project has been approved by Bellberry Human Research Ethics Committee, accredited by the National Health and Medical Research Council. If you have any questions, or would like further information about the project, please call the study support line on 1800 834 196.

Yours sincerely

Naomi Downer

Account Director

Colmar Brunton Research