Page 503 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 20 February 2019
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Schools—safety
MR WALL (Brindabella) (3.57), by leave: I move:
That this Assembly:
(1) notes:
(a) every student and teacher deserves to be safe in ACT schools;
(b) the lack of data kept or asked by the Minister for Education and Early Childhood Development to be kept by the Education Directorate on incidences, injury and implementation of current policies on addressing violence in ACT schools;
(c) it is now three years and three months since Professor Shaddock delivered the Schools for All Children & Young People, Report of the Expert Panel on Students with Complex Needs and Challenging Behaviour (Shaddock Report) on managing students with complex needs and challenging behaviours; and
(d) that despite the Shaddock Report’s many recommendations and the implementation committee set up to deliver those changes and despite the additional millions of dollars directed to training of staff and appropriate facilities in schools, reports of anti-social behaviour of students and incidences of violence in ACT schools is on the rise; and
(2) calls on the ACT government to:
(a) acknowledge the rise of incidences of violence in our schools and the failure of leadership and capability of the Minister for Education and Early Childhood Development to adequately address these issues;
(b) direct the Chief Minister to establish an independent inquiry to undertake a thorough audit of ACT schools to, inter alia, objectively assess current and historic rates of injury, current behaviour management practices, the training that underpins those policies, the reporting processes, and the completion rates for dealing with complaints by parents and teachers, comparisons with management practices in other school systems, and provide recommendations for change; and
(c) report back to the Assembly on the terms of reference, timeline for establishment of the inquiry and delivery of the report by the last sitting day in March 2019.
We go from the jovial debate we have just had to what can only be considered a very serious matter affecting the lives of not just parents across the ACT but their children. In early November 2018 a letter with 35 signatures of parents known as “Concerned parents of a Tuggeranong Primary school” was sent to the Education Directorate liaison unit. They spoke of the escalation of incidents at the school over the year, the bullying and the violent outbursts that their children had been subjected to and their frustration that little had been done at the time of the incidents to prevent escalation to injury or since then to prevent its reoccurrence. The directorate replied thanking them for the letter; assuring them that the school was taking the matter seriously. One of the authors of the original letter again wrote on 19 November advising of two more incidents at the school and again on 26 November outlining two subsequent incidents.
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