Page 509 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 20 February 2019
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government schools, there will always be the need for deliberate efforts to make school communities safe, supportive and inclusive.
The ACT is not alone in facing this challenge. Nationally there is clear data that points to bullying and violence being a problem in schools in all sectors right across the country. It is also clear from national data that the problem has existed for a long time, sadly.
The Safe and Supportive School Communities Working Group on their “Bullying. No Way!” website has provided some pretty confronting statistics. A little over one quarter, 27 per cent, of year 4 to year 9 Australian students reported being bullied every few weeks or more often in a national study in 2009. Peers are present as onlookers in 85 per cent of bullying interactions and play a central role in the bullying process.
Last year, in March 2018, the PricewaterhouseCoopers report which was commissioned by the Alannah & Madeline Foundation’s National Centre against Bullying echoed that earlier data from 2009. Almost 25 per cent of school students in Australia, or an estimated 910,000 children, experience bullying at some stage during their time in school.
In June 2018 the Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) national child health poll found a similar prevalence of verbal, social, physical and online bullying in schools. And as poll director, paediatrician Dr Anthea Rhodes, said:
Bullying is not just a schoolyard problem, it is a whole community problem—it is serious and common and it can have harmful effects on the physical, social and emotional wellbeing of children and young people.
It is clear that bullying and violence in schools are a problem and, despite the ACT government’s firm commitment to safe and supportive school communities, it is a problem that will always require attention. There is no simple, ultimate answer because the government will always welcome any child or young person into our schools. We will not exclude students from government schools because they present challenges, as would seem to be the position of those opposite, as you can tell from their line of questioning last week.
While there is some national data, as I have indicated through responses to questions on notice and other discussions in this place, school-specific data about ACT government schools is not as readily available as we would like. The reason for this is no more than that schools have until recently been working with a legacy IT system.
The Education Directorate’s legacy administration system, called MAZE, consisted of a database for each school, with a limited number of fields in each school’s database that synced nightly to a central data repository. This central repository was primarily used for system backup and manual data extraction for annual and national reporting. Accessing the centrally held data required an expert technician. Alongside this, most schools also held most student behaviour data on paper-based records. Suspension
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