Improvements were observed in adolescents' flexible thinking and social insights, and parent's perception of their child's self-regulation.

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The widening participation agenda means that students will be entering degree courses with increasingly diverse needs, particularly with respect to the academic skills necessary for successful tertiary study in Australia. This paper presents findings from a mixed methods project investigating first year social work students' perceived role in academic skills and their development. Students expressed the perception that academic skill requirements and how they would be assessed should be made explicit, and identified a stigma associated with accessing study support services. The paper concludes that an intentional design strategy, such as embedding academic skills into the curriculum, helps bridge the different expectations between academics and students in the teaching and learning of academic skills, and hence constitutes a socially inclusive strategy to teaching professional courses such as social work, within higher education. Recommendations to enhance the success and sustainability of such an initiative in the current higher education environment are offered.

In Australia, some non-Aboriginal social workers and academics have difficulty working in partnership with Aboriginal children, families and communities because they do not know how to build authentic relationships and are fearful of doing so (Zubrzycki, Green, Jones, Stratton, Young, & Bessarab, 2014). This is particularly the case in Child Protection where children continue to be removed from Aboriginal families (Productivity Commission, 2019).Reciprocal and genuine relationships involve holding Aboriginal worldviews as equally valid as Euro-Western ones. For non-Aboriginal social workers and academics, this means moving beyond a 'helping' stance, and towards genuine openness to learn and understand the world, and their place in it, in new ways. This paper shows how two social work academics undertook building relationships with Traditional Custodians in our local area to establish a resource for students that foregrounds Aboriginal ways of knowing and learning, by using the Tree of Life concept to embody Aboriginal experiences. The Aboriginal author focused on coming together respectfully to create a better-shared understanding on connecting to Country. For the non-Aboriginal author, a transformation occurred, gaining embodied understanding of her own belonging and connection to Country. The paper concludes with reflections useful to others embarking on this journey. Implications:• Cultivating an academic environment that prioritises forming authentic relationships with Traditional Custodians on Country is essential in order to be culturally responsive.• A decolonising embodied concept, Tree of Life, invites social workers to take a journey of personal self-discovery of belongingness and cultural heritage.• A simulation resource developed with Traditional Custodians can disrupt daily instances of colonisation and work toward social workers reflecting on practice to minimise further harm in working with Aboriginal communities.