Emerging Minds

What it is

Emerging Minds Learning is the free online training side of Emerging Minds, an Australian organization whose site describes its work as "advancing infant, child and adolescent mental health for over 20 years." The training page calls Emerging Minds Learning "your home for free online training courses to support children's mental health and wellbeing," and it is written for professionals in health, community and social services rather than for parents studying on their own.

For a practitioner looking for continuing education, that makes it a free course catalog on one subject: helping children aged 0-12, and the parents and families around them, with mental health and emotional wellbeing. The home page adds that Emerging Minds "has been dedicated to the mental health and emotional wellbeing of Australian infants, children and families for over 20 years," and the site sorts its material for four audiences: practitioners, families, organizations and researchers. The online courses are the center of the practitioner offer, with webinars, podcasts, practice papers and toolkits around them that a course taker can use alongside.

The courses

The training page states the purpose of the courses plainly: they "are designed to support professionals in health, community and social services to grow their skills and confidence in working with children (aged 0-12), parents and families." Learners browse an "extensive range of topics" on that page and pick courses from there. Access runs through a Login/Register account on the same site, and every course on the training page is described as free, so there is no plan to compare and no checkout.

Three courses are promoted by name on the home page, and they show how wide the catalog reaches:

• Supporting infants, children and families during disaster response, announced as a new online course. It sits beside a set of crisis response resources for disaster workers supporting families and fact sheets for parents and families during disasters, so a worker can take the course and then hand families material written for them.
• Supporting children in general practice using focused psychological strategies, aimed at the GP consultation. The home page also points general practitioners to a separate collection it labels "Accredited resources for GPs."
• Practice strategies for supporting autistic and ADHDer children's mental health, which uses neurodiversity-affirming language in its own title.

These three titles reach very different practitioners: disaster and recovery workers, general practitioners, and people supporting autistic and ADHD children. Apart from the GP resources it labels accredited, the training pages say nothing about certificates or credit hours for the courses.

For organizations and teams

Emerging Minds Learning has an organizational side as well. The home page introduces the Emerging Minds Learning Workplace Dashboard as "a new tool to support learning in your organisation," with its own link to register or learn more. For a service manager, it is the route to bring the free courses into a team's staff development instead of leaving each practitioner to find them alone.

The "Our work" section lists a workforce development framework, implementation support, prevention and early intervention, research and evaluation, lived and living experience partnerships, and work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The About section names NWC delivery partners, a Board, a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Consultancy Group, a Reconciliation Action Plan and a Statement of Compliance with Child Safety Framework. An organization deciding whether to send staff to free external training can see from these who governs the program and how it treats child safety.

Resources beyond the courses

The resource library is organized four ways. Watch holds "interviews, animations, interactive sessions and more," split into webinars and videos. Listen carries podcasts with "the latest ideas and insights from expert guests." Read runs from short articles to guides, grouped as In focus pieces, fact sheets and practice papers. Toolkits gather related resources into collections on one theme.

Recent items on the home page give a sense of the tone. One piece explains simple mindfulness techniques a parent can try with a child. A collection on understanding the whole child makes the case that a child's mental health cannot be separated from the wider context of their life. The PERCS Conversation Guide is offered to practitioners who are "not sure how to talk with parents about their children, particularly when the family is facing adversity." Another item covers building workforce capability to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families through social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB). A short article sets out how early childhood education and care (ECEC) and mental health professionals can build partnerships to support trauma-impacted children. Research summaries such as the July 2026 edition provide "a selection of recently released papers, systematic reviews and meta-analyses related to infant and child mental health."

For families, Emerging Minds Families was "developed in collaboration with family members with lived experience, practitioners and using the latest research," and offers "practical and trustworthy information for families to use directly or for practitioners to share and use with the parents and families they work with." A separate set, Parenting our way, is written for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents and families, and a short Emm animation covers five ways to support kids' mental health. A practitioner who finishes a course therefore has material ready to pass on.

Webinars and events

The events listing pairs Emerging Minds with other Australian bodies. Three on-demand webinars run with the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS): trauma prevention and early intervention approaches with children and young people; centering children when supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families; and identifying and responding to child sexual abuse, focused on the mental health of children and young people. Each is open online over a set window of dates rather than at a single time. A session on transition to school, on how to support children and families, runs with the Mental Health Professionals' Network (MHPN), and Emerging Minds is listed at a Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) conference at the Adelaide Convention Centre.

Principles and research behind the training

The site publishes its guiding principles for child mental health: cultural and spiritual identity, trauma informed practice, prevention and early intervention, the child and their local ecology, relationships matter, strengths and vulnerabilities, resilience, a developmental perspective, and children's rights. Those principles explain the recurring themes across the course titles and articles, from culturally safe work with First Nations families to trauma-aware practice.

Emerging Minds also studies the workforce it trains. The home page announces that the 2026 National Workforce Survey for Child, Parent and Family Mental Health "is now live," and it publishes a summary of findings from the 2023 National Workforce Survey. The site itself offers a high contrast toggle, adjustable text sizes and a Safe exit button, which matter on a site that families under stress may also visit.

Who it suits

Emerging Minds Learning suits practitioners in Australian health, community and social services who work with children up to 12 and their families and want specialized training at no cost: general practitioners, disaster and recovery workers, practitioners supporting autistic and ADHD children, and early childhood and mental health professionals who work together. Service managers can use the Workplace Dashboard to bring the courses into staff development, and the webinars with AIFS and MHPN extend the catalog with sessions on trauma, child safety and school transition.

It is narrower than a general continuing education catalog. Every course concerns children's mental health, so a nurse, counselor or teacher looking for credit in another subject will need a second provider. Its partners, events and framing are Australian, which suits local practitioners best. For anyone whose work touches young children's mental health, the combination of free courses, ready-made family resources and a clear set of principles makes it a strong place to start.