Page 716 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 8 March 2005
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As documented in a paper presented to the ninth Australian Institute of Family Studies conference in Melbourne last week, some 20 per cent of young people have been found to suffer from moderate or severe depression and some 19 per cent were assessed as moderately or severely anxious. In the light of this information, it was strange to hear at an annual reports hearing that there was nothing of this sort of problem in ACT schools.
In answers to questions from Dr Foskey and me, Assembly members received the usual bland assertions that all was right with the world and we had signed up to a nationally accredited framework. When I asked whether there were any problems with bullying in ACT schools, the officials assured me that all was right with the world and they knew of no schools where things were going wrong. These were the views of the officials and at no time were they gainsaid by the minister, who remained very quiet throughout the discussion. At no time did she correct the record.
The first time I raised in this place the issue of bullying was in relation to a number of teachers who had been bullied by a senior teacher at a government high school. The extent of the problem of bullying of teachers by teachers is, in itself, great. The impact on workplace safety, on staff morale and on the health of the work force is far reaching and it deserves to be a topic unto itself.
In addition to that, students can also bully and intimidate teachers. I have a former teacher among my acquaintance who received compensation from Comcare for harassment she received at the hands of students at a government high school in the ACT, and it has probably resulted in her giving up teaching for good. This is a highly qualified young person.
Let us turn to the impact on children. In the adjournment debate of the last sitting, I quoted at length from an email from a parent of a child who attended a government high school where terror seemed to reign. I know of at least two primary schools where the level of terror is just as high and where we are starting to see an exodus from those schools.
In the same adjournment debate, I spoke of two girls who were ferociously and repeatedly kicked. Their parents were not even contacted by the school after this assault. The first the parents knew of this assault was when the injured girls went home. After doctors’ reports and complaints, the perpetrator was put on one day’s internal suspension. One of those girls is still receiving counselling as a result of that incident.
A few weeks ago, I spoke on WIN Television about this problem and that prompted other parents to come forward and tell the television station their story of how their children were being hounded out of another government primary school. In that particular school, I know of four separate, unrelated instances of ongoing bullying. Some have resulted in children leaving the school, some the government system altogether.
The most horrendous incident involved a three-year-old student who was supposed to be supervised in the playground because of a history of violence and who brought a screwdriver to school and was found with his adversary on the ground, screwdriver to his throat. The child who intervened—a slightly older child—and broke up the dangerous
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