St Joseph’s College prioritising concussion safety

ST JOSEPH’S College is taking concussion seriously and has taken another step forward to help its students.

The school has been encouraging parents and guardians to report concussions in recent years and has now introduced a ‘concussion pass’.

Concussion officer Sherryn Ross explained the concept.

“I speak with the parents or the carers of the student, and the student themselves, and their year-level coordinator or house coordinator, depending on what age they are; to work out if they’re still symptomatic.

“What we’re doing is issuing a pass so that they can show their teachers that they are symptomatic, they’re suffering from a concussion, and the pass just enables them to have what they call a ‘brain break’.

“So they can just step outside of class for five minutes to reset, step away from the noise, the lights, the concentration.”

The concussion officer said the school had Barwon Health do a presentation to all staff on concussion to help with how to support a student in their recovery.

She went on to talk about what had motivated the policy update.

“Being an all-boys school with about 1,800 boys, concussion seems to be a big thing, not just at school.

“But what we were realising, was that boys were getting concussed outside of school and then coming to school and not saying anything and they were doing PE and things like that.

“And there was a risk of aggravation to the concussion. So once we realised that was happening, for the last couple of years, we’ve been encouraging parents to notify us.”

On top of that, the school has been promoting externally run webinars.

“It’s been a matter of trying to get that out there and certainly the reporting is increasing year-on-year,” Ross said.

“This year has been huge, we’ve had 33 external concussions reported to us to date this year and we’ve had about 18 concussions that have happened at school [as of June 26].

“The majority of it is informal playing at lunchtime; playing football, basketball, downball, [with] a few slips and trips.”

She said the school followed the Australian Concussion Guidelines for Youth and Community Sport, which was released in 2024.

Ross said the students were also taking concussion seriously.

“There’s so much more information out in the public, [the] media and the like on concussion and the long-term effects of it.

“So they’re pretty good now at understanding that it’s better to have a bit of time off now so that they can continue playing in the future, obviously, depending on how many concussions they end up having during a period of time.”

Ross said the consistent messaging from the nation’s leading sporting bodies – since the Australian concussion guidelines were released – had helped the cause.

To read the policy, download issue 9 of the school’s newsletter at sjc.vic.edu.au/current-families/our-news-and-events/newsletter