Psychosocial Safety Checklist For Australian Schools
Spot the gaps in your school's psychosocial hazard compliance
Who this is for
The person at your school who owns staff wellbeing, compliance, and everything in between — usually all at once. If psychosocial safety sits on your desk alongside three other portfolios, this guide is written for you.
What's in this guide
- The hazards - the psychosocial risks most common in Australian schools and RTOs, and who they affect
- The four steps - what the Code of Practice requires: identify, assess, control, review and monitor
- The checklist - a quick gap analysis across all four steps, plus a test of how your current EAP stacks up
- Next steps - what closing the gaps actually looks like
How to use this guide
Read Parts 01 and 02 for context, then spend ten minutes on the checklist in Part 03. Tick only what you could evidence today, not what you know is happening informally. Anything left unticked is a gap, and the completed checklist becomes your audit baseline and the starting point for a conversation with your leadership team.
Why this matters
Since 2022, Australian schools have been legally required to identify, assess, control, monitor and review psychosocial hazards. Most HR and WHS leads already know this. The gap isn't awareness — it's documentation.
Conversations with staff and informal check-ins do count as evidence of consultation in an audit. But only if they're recorded. When your evidence is scattered across email threads, meeting notes and people's memories, you can be doing the work properly and still be unable to demonstrate it. That's the position most schools are in.
The scale of the underlying problem is why regulators moved. Nine out of ten Australian teachers are experiencing severe stress and nearly 70% say their workload is unmanageable, according to UNSW research. In the Black Dog Institute survey, 60% of absences in the previous month were due to a mental health or emotional problem.
Many schools assume an EAP satisfies the obligation. It doesn't. The requirement is a documented four-step process you can back up with evidence — and an EAP is one lower-order control within step three.
This checklist takes about ten minutes. It won't fix anything on its own, but it will tell you exactly where you stand before someone else asks.
Hello 👋 I’m Joel the founder of Foremind.
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