An elite Melbourne school has encouraged its students not to focus on perfection but to embrace failure in an attempt to build resilience and teach them to learn from their mistakes.

Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar School has developed "failure week", which involves projecting the mistakes of teachers onto screens in every classroom.

The school's head of counselling, Dr Bridget McPherson, said it was vital for students to recognise that failure was an important part of learning.

"It's actually impossible to learn and learn well if you don't make mistakes and you don't reassess your strategy and you don't experience things going wrong," she said.

"Focussing everything on perfection and achievement doesn't get you very far at all in terms of learning, so it's crucial for that."

An independent study released last week found only 62 per cent of girls in secondary schools had a strong sense of wellbeing and more than 55 per cent were assessed as anxious.

The study found there has been a huge growth Australian schools trying to address the issue, with nine in 10 independents schools now offering a wellness service to students, and public schools following suit.

Dr McPherson said fear of failure in the classroom could easily spread to other areas of life.

"We have young people who are reluctant to offer answers in class, because they're fearful of what they might look like if they get the answer wrong," she said.

"That moves all the way through to being quite stressed and anxious about grades and feedback from teachers for fear of disappointing people or looking, perhaps, not clever enough in front of their teachers and families."

With this year's Year 12 exams beginning in less than two months, student anxiety levels are heightened across the state.

Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar prides itself on its well above average ENTER scores. The school released a graph showing 63 per cent of its students achieved a score of above 80, compared to 20 per cent of students statewide.

The school boasts "excellent VCE results" as a top feature of the school on its website.

Dr McPherson said teachers were initially wary of the idea of celebrating their failures, but had since got on board.

"There was a little bit of anxiety when we first talked about it, the word failure itself has a huge stigma to it, I think even naming the week failure week people found a little bit strange," she said.

Dr McPherson said she would be sharing her own story about when she crashed a car during her first driving lesson.

"Mine is actually about a pretty major car accident on my first ever driving lesson where I managed to mount the curb and drive into an antique wall of my neighbour's. It was pretty spectacular," she said.

Parents were not pre-warned about the idea, but she said she hoped that it would spread to conversations in the home.

"I would really strongly encourage parents to talk about their failures. It seems like something that parents don't do, I think more just through lack of thinking about it," she said.

"But it's amazingly powerful for young people to hear that their parents have had small failures, and bigger ones, over the course of their lives."