When ten Out of School Hours Care centers across South Australia completed a six-session mental health program called Big Talks for Little People in 2025, something quietly powerful shifted for the children who needed it most: the ones being bullied felt safer, made more friends, and began to thrive.
The program represents a growing recognition that mental health support shouldn't be confined to classrooms or therapist offices—it belongs in the everyday spaces where children spend their hours. Out of School Hours Care, often abbreviated OSHC, serves as an extended learning environment where children gather after school ends, yet this setting had been largely overlooked as a place to intervene in bullying and build emotional resilience. Flinders University researchers discovered something striking: OSHC students reported being twice as likely to experience bullying as their mainstream school peers, and they felt less happy at school with fewer friendships. The discovery demanded action.
Dr. Yu Takizawa, a Mental Health lecturer from Flinders University's College of Human Sciences and Culture, led the latest research into Big Talks for Little People, a program that had already shown promise in primary school classrooms. In its original 2021 trial, led by Professor Phillip Slee, the program achieved a 25% reduction in self-reported bullying incidents. When Professors Shane Pill and Phillip Slee adapted it for OSHC settings in 2022, they recognized educators needed deeper training to identify struggling children and respond effectively. Rather than abandoning the approach, the team revised their professional development materials based on feedback from OSHC staff themselves, creating a more responsive tool.
The 2025 implementation, funded by a grant from Little Heroes Foundation, tested this refined version across the ten South Australian centers. The results offer genuine hope for vulnerable children. Those who had been targets of bullying before the program reported significantly less bullying afterward and felt safer—not just in OSHC, but at school itself. They gained friendships and experienced measurable gains in happiness and overall well-being. The mechanism driving this change wasn't complicated, but it was elegant: the program taught young people transferable social-emotional skills including emotional literacy, self-expression, and bullying-specific coping strategies they could deploy across different environments.
What makes this work stand out is that it didn't require elaborate infrastructure or expensive specialists. It happened through structured, evidence-informed sessions delivered by existing educators in spaces children already inhabited. Interviews with educators and focus groups with children showed that staff felt more confident identifying struggling students and children felt heard and equipped to respond to social challenges.
"The studies indicate that OSHC care can be a place where important mental health education is promoted through well-structured and evidence-informed programs like Big Talks for Little People," Dr. Takizawa noted. The finding challenges the invisible hierarchy in education that reserves serious mental health work for formal settings. It suggests that care workers, not just clinical professionals, can be powerful agents of change when given proper training and tools.
For bullied children in South Australia, the message is clear: safe spaces and supportive adults who understand their struggles can help them build the resilience and friendships that childhood should include.