Introduction to Volume 3

This volume focuses on children in Tasmanian government schools and how schools and the Department for Education, Children and Young People (formerly the Department of Education) prevent and respond to child sexual abuse.

A note on language

In October 2022, the Department of Education was renamed the Department for Education, Children and Young People, and given expanded functions. In addition to education, the new department is now responsible for the child protection and youth justice systems. In this volume, we use the term ‘Department’ to refer to either the Department of Education (as it then was) or the relevant functions that relate to education within the new Department for Education, Children and Young People. When we specifically mean the previous Department of Education or the new Department for Education, Children and Young People, we use the full name.

Every day, thousands of Tasmanian children are entrusted to the care of schools with the expectation they will be kept safe.

School is a place of learning, social connection and happiness for many students. Most school staff choose to work in the education system because they value children and want to educate and nurture them with care and compassion. We expect that these staff will welcome the improvements already underway to make children safer each day in the government school system.

However, for some children, schools have been a place of abuse and harm. Victim-survivors told us about their experiences of being abused by staff or fellow students. We heard about the trauma of their abuse and the betrayal many felt when their school or the Department failed to acknowledge the harm, to take prompt and effective action to support them, and to mitigate the risk to other children and young people.

Many of these children did not have a voice, and those who did speak out were often ignored, silenced and disbelieved. They lived with the burden of being abused, often alone and isolated. Their teachers, the Department and indeed the broader community failed to give them the care they needed and deserved.

The responsibility for this rests not with the child but with:

• the abusers who were allowed to work in the public education system
• the teachers and other staff who saw but did not intervene
• the principals and leaders who were told and did not believe
• State Service employees who treated the abuse of a child as an employment issue and focused on the rights and vocation of the adult instead of protecting children.

Many victim-survivors said that protecting others from harm was their main motivation for making a submission to our Commission of Inquiry, for attending a session with a Commissioner or for giving evidence as part of our hearings. We are indebted to everyone who shared their experience with us.

In August 2020, not long before the Government established our Commission of Inquiry, the Department announced the Independent Inquiry into the Tasmanian Department of Education’s Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (‘Independent Education Inquiry’). That inquiry was completed by Professors Stephen Smallbone and Tim McCormack in June 2021. It highlighted several problems, which we also heard about. These included:

• a narrow understanding of the types of conduct that can constitute or be a precursor to child sexual abuse, including failures to acknowledge the seriousness of professional boundary breaches or to recognise potential grooming behaviours
• unclear policies and procedures that were not fit-for-purpose and were applied inconsistently or were not understood by staff and the broader school community
• inadequate professional and skills development for staff and volunteers to understand their obligations and identify and effectively respond to child sexual abuse and harmful sexual behaviours
• poor responses to disclosures and complaints about child sexual abuse, leading to delayed action to reduce risk, poor-quality investigations and not enough support for those affected
• inadequate guidance and training on how to prevent and respond to harmful sexual behaviours
• a lack of coordination and focus on the safety of children in the Department—with responsibilities for safeguarding children dispersed across different roles and units, too spread out to be effective.

The Department accepted all the Independent Education Inquiry’s recommendations.

Through its Office of Safeguarding Children and Young People (‘Office of Safeguarding’), set up in August 2021, the Department has been implementing these recommendations at the same time as our Commission of Inquiry has been underway. We endorse the Independent Education Inquiry’s recommendations. Rather than duplicate them, we instead recommend that the Implementation Monitor evaluates their implementation (refer to Chapter 22, Recommendation 22.1).

However, some matters did not receive close attention in the Independent Education Inquiry. This was either because they fell outside its terms of reference or due to factors outside of the authors’ control. We considered some of these issues in greater detail in our hearings, including:

• inconsistent and inadequate access to child sexual abuse prevention programs, which can—in an age-appropriate way—empower children and young people of all ages to understand their right to be safe from abuse and build their confidence to disclose their concerns to trusted adults
• the broader disciplinary framework to manage misconduct or complaints about employees in an educational context—including the level of arms-length advice and support required to ensure these are managed appropriately, prioritise children’s safety, provide procedural fairness and uphold the integrity of disciplinary processes
• the powers and functions of the Teachers Registration Board—particularly its ability (or inability, as the case may be) to share and receive information, maintain visibility of teachers, impose professional development requirements and enforce the requirements of its legislation. We also considered whether the Board is appropriately resourced and empowered to acquit its functions.

To help illuminate the Department’s policies, processes and systems, we selected several case studies, which we discuss in Chapter 5. For some of these, we include the voices of victim-survivors who provided firsthand accounts of their experiences.

The Department has long had strategies and safeguards designed to protect children and young people in its care. These include evolving policies and procedures, annual mandatory reporting training and requirements that staff and volunteers hold Registration to Work with Vulnerable People. The Teachers Registration Board also has measures to ensure that people registered to teach are safe and suitable to do so. Yet it was clear—best evidenced in the apologies delivered by the Secretary of the then Department of Education, Timothy Bullard, during hearings—that the Department has significantly failed to protect students. It must invest in change and improvement.

We heard from the Department about initiatives underway to ensure students are safe from sexual abuse. These include refreshed and improved policies, a more expansive training program for staff, introducing Safeguarding Leads in each school, building expertise in identifying and responding to harmful sexual behaviours, and a commitment to system reviews to drive reflection and continuous improvement. We commend and welcome these initiatives.

However, we identified some areas where more work is needed, and we make recommendations accordingly.

This volume has three chapters. In Chapter 4—Background and context—we outline Tasmania’s education system, noting that we focus on government schools. We discuss the Independent Education Inquiry and its findings and recommendations in detail given its recency. We then outline the Government’s response to the Independent Education Inquiry.

In Chapter 5—Case studies—we outline eight case studies, some of which we explored in detail in our hearings. In these case studies, we pinpoint systemic issues in the Department’s responses to allegations of child sexual abuse, as well as recent improvements. These case studies and the problems they highlight informed our recommendations in Chapter 6.

The recommendations we make in Chapter 6 include:

• putting in place mandatory professional development and training requirements for staff and volunteers (targeted at their role responsibilities and degree of interaction with students) to ensure all those engaging with students have baseline knowledge about child sexual abuse and harmful sexual behaviours that can be refreshed and built on over time
• providing greater guidance and mandated professional development on harmful sexual behaviours, recognising the complexity of these matters and the sensitivity, expertise and nuance required to respond to them appropriately
• increasing funding and powers for the Teachers Registration Board to enable it to respond quickly and effectively to identified risks posed by teachers, using a broader suite of regulatory tools and conditions to address concerning conduct by teachers
• establishing an Incident Management Directorate to oversee and manage complaints about child sexual abuse by staff. This Directorate should support schools to deal with distressing incidents according to best practice, while offering a degree of independence that builds the trust and confidence of affected students and their families and carers.

It is tempting to imagine that many of the problems described in this volume are problems of the past. While we can see improvement over time in how schools and the Department have responded to child sexual abuse—in line with growing community awareness and understanding of the dynamics and impacts of abuse—we continued to hear about many of the problems as recently as the time of writing, particularly in relation to harmful sexual behaviours.1

There is no room for complacency, and we expect—particularly as the Department’s functions expand—a continued commitment to placing the needs and safety of children at the centre.

1. Introduction

In this chapter, we give background and context to Tasmania’s public education system, listing some facts and figures. This discussion notes the significant size of the Department in terms of its number of employees and the number of children and young people who are in its care every day. We briefly set out the Department’s internal structure before and after it was expanded to include several functions of the former Department of Communities. We also give a basic overview of the Teachers Registration Board.

We then examine, in some detail, the Independent Education Inquiry’s report. After providing some background and context to the report, we describe the key problems it identifies, set out the recommendations it makes and outline the Department’s response to the report.

Throughout our Inquiry we have focused on schools, but all children in the Tasmanian education system (including those attending Child and Family Learning Centres) will benefit from efforts to prevent and better respond to child sexual abuse.

1. Tasmania’s education system

1. The system in numbers

According to departmental data, in 2022 there were 61,252 students enrolled in Tasmanian government schools.2 Just under half of those students were female (48.3 per cent) and just over half were male (51.6 per cent).3 There were approximately 7,400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students enrolled in government schools in 2022, representing 12.1 per cent of all students.4

The Department provides education services to these students through 195 government schools across the State.5 In 2021–22, Tasmania had:

• 125 primary schools
• 29 secondary schools
• 25 combined primary and secondary schools
• eight senior secondary schools (colleges)
• eight support schools.6

The Department is also responsible for the State’s libraries, which are administered by Libraries Tasmania.

In March 2022, Tasmania had 7,205 fully registered teachers, 3,778 provisionally registered teachers and 233 holders of Limited Authorities to Teach.7 While the Teachers Registration Board does not have ‘reliable information about where a teacher is employed’, the Board’s Watched Registrations list provides some indication of where teachers are working.8 The Watched Registrations list (discussed in Chapter 6) gives employers access to information about teachers’ Registration to Work with Vulnerable People status and whether or not there are conditions placed on their registration as teachers.9

Based on information on the Watched Registrations list, the Registrar of the Teachers Registration Board told us that, as of April 2022, there were 5,830 government school teachers and 3,438 non-government school teachers (1,862 teachers in Catholic schools and 1,576 teachers in independent schools).10 Across all sectors, the Board had granted 310 Limited Authorities to Teach (noting that a person may hold more than one Limited Authority to Teach at a time).11 A Limited Authority to Teach allows a person who wants to teach to do so if they have appropriate skills but no qualification or registration to teach. These are generally a temporary solution to fill role gaps.12

Overall, the Department employed 11,148 people in 2021–22.13 Just over half of those (5,700) were employed as teachers (this includes 534 principals and assistant principals).14 Of those people employed as teachers, 4,193 (73.6 per cent) were female and 1,507 (26.4 per cent) were male.15 The average age of all female teachers was 49 years, and the average age of all male teachers was 44 years.16 While data was provided about the number of female and male teachers by employment status (full-time fixed-term or full-time permanent; part-time fixed-term or part-time permanent), the Department did not publish the number of teachers on the Fixed Term and Relief Employment Register in its 2021–22 annual report. However, the Government stated in early 2022 that there were nearly 1,700 relief teachers in Tasmania.17 Other support staff employed in government schools in 2022 include teacher assistants (2,116), school psychologists (101), social workers (119), speech pathologists (56), nurses (84) and education support specialists (35).18

Our terms of reference require that we examine the Government’s responses to child sexual abuse in government institutions. But some of the recommendations in this chapter may have broader application and may therefore also be relevant to non-government schools—particularly in relation to the Teachers Registration Board. This is because all teachers working in Tasmania, whether in government or non-government schools, must be registered with the Teachers Registration Board. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in addition to the more than 60,000 students enrolled in Tasmanian government schools in 2022, there were 26,138 students enrolled in non-government schools.19 Non-government schools include Catholic schools (38 schools) and independent schools (35 schools).20 In Tasmania, non-government school registration is the responsibility of the Registrar, Education, and is overseen by the Non-Government Schools Registration Board.21

1. Department for Education, Children and Young People structure

In February 2022, the Tasmanian Government announced that the functions that support children in the Department of Communities would be transferred to the Department of Education.22 The Government’s rationale for these changes included reducing the ‘siloed approach [to] … departmental structures’ recommended by an Independent Review of the Tasmanian State Service, and improving services and outcomes for children and young people by strengthening departmental administrative structures.23

Timothy Bullard, the Secretary overseeing the expanded Department, told us that the new Department provides the opportunity to:

• combine collective, knowledge, skills, information and resources
• work collaboratively in the best interests of children and young people.24

The new Department for Education, Children and Young People began in October 2022. These changes occurred after our Commission of Inquiry was established and were made independently of it.

In our chapter on out of home care (Chapter 9), we note our reservations about the merger of the Child Safety Service into the new ‘mega’ department. Our main concern is that the attention that child protection requires may be difficult to achieve in a much larger departmental framework.

1. New departmental structure

Under the newly formed Department for Education, Children and Young People, the ‘Keeping Children Safe’ division—headed by a Deputy Secretary and encompassing Services for Children and Families and the Office of Safeguarding Children and Young People—reports directly to the Secretary, and the new ‘Services for Youth Justice’ section reports to the Associate Secretary.25 Most of the education functions of the new Department report to the Associate Secretary.

The Department has four portfolio services in relation to education:

• Portfolio Services for Development and Support—this portfolio service provides ‘those directly working with children and young people with the technical guidance and support they need to build their capability to have the greatest positive impact’.26 It includes Teaching and Learning, Wellbeing and Inclusion, Improvement Consultants, and People Capability and Development.
• Portfolio Services for Schools and Early Years—this portfolio service aims to ‘inspire, support and engage all children and young people to learn more, every day’.27 It includes Schools, Child and Family Learning Centres, and Learning Services (which support students and staff).
• Portfolio Services for Continuous Improvement and Evaluation—this portfolio service reviews and evaluates individual and system-level impacts of the Department. It includes Strategic Policy and Projects, Strategic Systems Development, External School Review, and Evaluation.
• Portfolio Services for Business Operations and Support—this portfolio provides human, financial and IT support. It includes People Services and Support, Legal Services, Information and Technology Services, and Organisational Safety.28

The Office of Safeguarding Children and Young People (‘Office of Safeguarding’) was established in response to an Independent Education Inquiry recommendation.29 The Office of Safeguarding drives longer term cultural change and continuous improvement to help the Department be an ‘exemplary child safe organisation’.30 The Executive Director, Office of Safeguarding, is responsible for a strategy and policy framework to embed the national Child Safe Standards across the Department.31 The work of the Office of Safeguarding also builds on the Department’s wellbeing strategy. The Office of Safeguarding and its role in keeping Tasmanian students safe is discussed in Chapter 6.

Other agencies associated with the new Department are Education Regulation (including the Teachers Registration Board), the Office of the State Archivist and the Commissioner for Children and Young People.32

Most of the information and evidence provided to us, particularly in the case studies in Chapter 5, referred to the Department’s previous structure. The former Department of Education had four divisions, and each had roles for protecting children and young people’s safety: Support and Development division, Learning division, Strategy and Performance division, and Corporate and Business Services division.33

1. Education-related independent bodies

The Teachers Registration Board is an independent statutory body that works with the Department to ensure teachers are appropriately qualified and to investigate complaints.34 The Board’s primary functions include registering teachers to work in government, Catholic and independent schools in Tasmania.35

Tasmanian teachers must be registered with the Board to ensure they meet the required standards and have the necessary skills. According to the Board, ‘registration promotes community confidence in the work of Tasmanian teachers and validates registered teachers as highly skilled professionals’.36

The Board also investigates complaints against teachers, and it may take disciplinary action where appropriate. This can include determining that a person is not of good character or is unfit to be a teacher. The Board works to improve teaching standards and maintains a code of ethics for teachers.37

In the financial year ending June 2020, the Teachers Registration Board had 12.8 full-time-equivalent positions. On average, the Board employed 14 part- and full-time employees.38 The Board had a total revenue (and other income from transactions) of just over $2 million in 2020, with just over one-third of this coming from the Government. Before 2017, almost all the Board’s revenue came from teacher registration fees.39 The Government committed to providing the Board $375,000 in 2022–23 and $383,000 in 2023–24 as part of its Safeguarding Children and Young People initiatives. It said this will allow the Board to engage more staff (up to three more full-time-equivalent positions) to ‘support the investigation of complaints and disciplinary processes’.40

Through submissions to our Inquiry and in our public hearings, we heard about several issues with the Board’s current legislative underpinnings and processes—these are discussed in Chapter 6.

1. Independent Education Inquiry into the Tasmanian Department of Education’s Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

The Independent Education Inquiry was announced in August 2020. Its purpose was to:

• examine what, if any, more actions and/or changes to the current systems applicable to, or used by, the Department should be made to minimise the risk of child sexual abuse in Tasmanian government schools
• complement, not substitute, the work of the National Royal Commission.41

Because our Commission of Inquiry was announced shortly after the start of the Independent Education Inquiry, the authors of the Independent Education Inquiry considered it appropriate to leave certain questions to be explored by us. Accordingly, the authors did not look at the roles of other government agencies (such as the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the then Department of Communities and Tasmania Police) and the Tasmanian Government itself in responding to child sexual abuse allegations against Department of Education personnel or students. The authors did, however, make recommendations for better information sharing and coordination between the Department of Education and some of these agencies.

Professors Stephen Smallbone and Tim McCormack completed the Independent Education Inquiry in June 2021. The findings and recommendations section of their report was released to the public in November 2021. The Government has identified a range of legal issues, including the potential identification of people who contributed to the inquiry, as the reason for only releasing the section on findings and recommendations.42 Shortly after this limited release, a full, albeit significantly redacted, version of the report was provided to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation under right to information laws.43 At the time of writing in 2023, the Tasmanian Government has not made the full report publicly available.44

1. Systemic problems identified by the Independent Education Inquiry

The report makes observations about systemic problems that have undermined responses to child sexual abuse. These include problems with organisational culture, governance and staffing, policies and procedures, the physical environment of schools, recruitment and transfers, training and knowledge, record keeping and information sharing.

1. Organisational culture

Through consultations, the Independent Education Inquiry heard that the Department of Education had ‘entrenched cultural values’ that manifested in the ‘prioritisation of adults’ interests over those of students’.45 Although it has improved over time, this culture still manifests in schools in several ways including:

• a belief that adults’ voices should be believed over those of children
• a belief that complying with guidelines in interactions with students is primarily to protect adults
• a readiness to disbelieve students who complain of sexual abuse ‘because it is easy [for students] to make false allegations’ or due to their backgrounds or circumstances.46 The false belief that children frequently lie about sexual abuse is discussed in Chapter 16.

While the report notes positive recent changes in the culture and leadership of the Department, it states that ‘residual cultural problems’ nevertheless remain.47

The research we commissioned conducted by Associate Professor Tim Moore and Emeritus Professor Morag McArthur about children’s perceptions of safety in institutional settings, similarly identified the power imbalance between adults and children in schools. Students talked about double standards creating power imbalances between teachers and students that made them feel unsafe:

… adults expect young people to be respectful and non-violent, but teachers still use their power over students, they can be disrespectful in the way that they speak to students, they work in ways that showed they were in charge and used that against students for example ‘I can swear at you but you can’t swear at me’.48

These children thought that broader societal attitudes often reflected in the school context: ‘There’s an issue at a societal level—as a community we don’t really take sexual harassment seriously enough or take action. So sometimes that plays out at schools’.49 They said it was therefore difficult to be sure they would be believed or taken seriously if they disclosed concerns.50

1. Governance and staffing

The report expressed concern that, at the time of its writing, there was:

… no single point of oversight or responsibility in [the Department] for all aspects of student safeguarding, and therefore no effective restraint on the fragmentation of safeguarding efforts across the organisation.51

It recommended establishing a Director of Student Safeguarding position. The Department has since set up the Office of Safeguarding and appointed Elizabeth Jack as Executive Director.52 The Office of Safeguarding is discussed in Chapter 6.

The report also stated that in many of the schools visited, the demand for school support staff was far greater than the resources the Department allocated for these positions.53 It noted that in trying to address this ‘chronic shortage’, the Department had deployed Student Wellbeing Teams to provide complex student case management support. However, the Independent Education Inquiry heard that the system seldom provided the ‘support it was established to deliver’, owing in large part to unclear policies and guidelines.54

We note that since the Independent Education Inquiry report was released, the Tasmanian Government has committed extra funding for professional support staff in schools. At the time of the Independent Education Inquiry, there were 110 social workers and 93 psychologists employed across Tasmania.55 The 2022–23 State Budget outlines that funding is allocated to help employ eight more psychologists and eight more social workers ‘to support student wellbeing and safety’, plus another four senior support staff.56

1. Obligations, policies and procedures

The Independent Education Inquiry heard that the Department’s ‘policy environment’ was ‘confused and crowded’, with new policies layered on top of existing ones. One senior official referred to the situation as ‘dying by policy’.57

The difficulties were compounded by the lack of an effective, central portal for staff to access the information they needed. The Independent Education Inquiry observed firsthand ‘how frustratingly difficult it is to find relevant policies and procedures, particularly through [the Department’s] publicly accessible online Policy Library’.58 Also, departmental staff had trouble applying or interpreting some policies and reported that policies about certain issues, including responding to harmful sexual behaviours, were lacking.59

The report expressed concern that, in some instances, there was a narrow interpretation of the requirement that employees must be acting ‘in the course of their employment’ for the State Service Code of Conduct to apply to their behaviour. This meant that inappropriate conduct occurring outside school hours or not on school grounds had not been subject to disciplinary proceedings.60

The report noted ‘broad agreement’ among those consulted that the State Service Code of Conduct was not suited to the distinct context of schools.61 While there could be ‘no objection’ to the general principles of the State Service Code of Conduct, the lack of a Department-specific code of conduct meant that allegations of sexual abuse against teachers were investigated under the generic provisions of Employment Direction No. 5, and a breach of the State Service Code of Conduct had to be established before formal disciplinary proceedings could be instigated.62 The report noted that departmental staff ‘expressed strong support for a [Department]-specific code of conduct, both to formalise rules and expectations about behaviour in schools and to enable [Department]-specific responses and investigations’.63 The report recommended that the Department drafts its own code of conduct.64

The Department’s policies and procedures that relate to child safeguarding are discussed in Chapter 6.

1. Physical environment

The report observed that some school layouts created spaces that did not allow for third-party observation, increasing the opportunity for a person to sexually abuse children.65

Certain physical areas in schools—such as gyms, changing rooms, dedicated drama/music areas, secluded outdoor spaces behind buildings and other isolated spaces—were noted as common places that posed a risk to student safety.66 The report recommended that schools be required to undertake ‘safeguarding risk assessments’ and create risk management plans to help mitigate these safety concerns. The report also noted that, encouragingly, newer school renovations and building projects are incorporating design elements that help reduce these risks.

1. Staff recruitment and transfers

The report acknowledged that the requirement for staff and volunteers in the Department to obtain Registration to Work with Vulnerable People was well understood and observed. However, it expressed concern about an apparent lack of appreciation for the ‘limited, albeit important’ role these checks have in safeguarding students.67 The authors identified several aspects of the Registration to Work with Vulnerable People Scheme that limit its usefulness in preventing child sexual abuse:

• Most convicted sex offenders had no prior record of sex offences and are therefore unlikely to have been discovered through the scheme.
• The impulse to sexually abuse children in an institution may not occur until the person is engaged by the institution, and this will not be picked up in pre-employment screening.
• The scheme does not apply to children, who may be more likely than adults to ‘abuse other students’.68

The Registration to Work with Vulnerable People Scheme is discussed in Chapter 18.

The report noted other problems involving teacher registration and transfers, in particular the national mutual registration scheme, which unscrupulous teachers can exploit to get registered in another jurisdiction.69 The report recommended developing a student safeguarding policy that includes clear direction about how ‘due diligence is to be exercised in staff recruitment and transfers’.70

1. Staff training, knowledge and skills

The Independent Education Inquiry heard staff were confused about how to respond to allegations of abuse, were not aware of some policies, and thought that policies were difficult to implement.71 It also heard that trainee teachers were told to make a mandatory report whenever they had a slight suspicion, but many trainee teachers felt they would be perceived as causing trouble or potentially damaging ‘a colleague’s career or family’.72 The report noted a lack of adequate training about safeguarding for trainee teachers.73

The Independent Education Inquiry heard that:

• there was a lack of training for staff about how to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse
• induction training for new teachers was ‘skewed’ towards responding to, rather than preventing, allegations of child sexual abuse
• there was a lack of training from the Department about how to receive disclosures and manage information.74

The report noted that, at the time of its writing, discussions were occurring at the senior executive level in the Department about rolling out ‘preventative training for staff on grooming behaviours and to have ongoing training to recognise signs and patterns, as well as precursors to abusive behaviour’.75 Training is discussed in Chapter 6.

1. Record keeping

The Independent Education Inquiry received unanimous feedback that the Department did ‘not have a system of record keeping to track the number of cases, trends or features of child sexual abuse in Tasmanian Government schools’.76 The Department’s Legal Services unit provided the Independent Education Inquiry with a spreadsheet as evidence of the main departmental record of ‘suspected, alleged or proven sexual abuse incidents involving [departmental] personnel and/or students’.77 The spreadsheet was created in 2017 in anticipation of questions about the National Redress Scheme, civil claims, police investigations and privacy information requests. The spreadsheet was not a complete record of allegations or incidents of child sexual abuse in schools, nor did its design allow basic statistics to be calculated.78

The Independent Education Inquiry also considered the Department’s Student Support System in this context, explained as a:

… digital repository of school records (including confidential notes by social workers and psychologists) which … may include information about students affected by sexual and other abuse.79

Stakeholders described this system as antiquated, ineffective and time-consuming to use, and schools and individuals in schools used it inconsistently.80

The report stated that a lack of record keeping impeded investigations into current and historical allegations of child sexual abuse made against employees. It recommended that the Department implements a robust system for recording complaints.81

1. Information sharing and interagency relationships

The Independent Education Inquiry heard of a lack of systematic information sharing between schools about employment concerns involving teachers and other staff.82 Also, in investigating teachers subject to child sexual abuse allegations, government agencies were unwilling to share information with one another and with non-government organisations.83 We understand that some of that lack of information sharing is the result of Office of the Solicitor-General advice on information-sharing restrictions in the Personal Information Protection Act 2004 (‘Personal Information Protection Act’).84

The report noted that ‘one of the most common barriers’ to information sharing is the restriction on what information the Department can share with the Teachers Registration Board about allegations of child abuse and vice versa, owing to privacy legislation.85 This is discussed in Chapter 6.

The Independent Education Inquiry also heard about inconsistencies in how the Department and other agencies, such as police, the Child Safety Service and the Sexual Assault Support Service, interact when dealing with suspected child sexual abuse in educational settings.86 The authors recommended that the Department develops a memorandum of understanding with police to ‘help clarify roles and responsibilities’.87

The issue of information sharing, and the scope and effect of Tasmania’s privacy legislation, is discussed in Chapter 19.

1. Recommendations of the Independent Education Inquiry

The report made 20 recommendations about changes to governance/leadership, policies/procedures, training and professional development. In particular, it made recommendations to:

• improve record keeping to better track patterns and trends of child sexual abuse (recommendation 1)88
• ensure safeguarding decisions and actions are based on the principle of acting in the best interests of the child to address the ‘residual cultural problem’ of putting the interests of adults above those of children (recommendation 2)89
• create a focus on prevention rather than just responding to allegations or concerns (recommendation 3)90
• develop a comprehensive student safeguarding policy and improve existing policies for mandatory reporting, technology use and duty of care (recommendation 4)91
• establish a Director of Safeguarding in the Department (recommendation 5)92
• undertake mandatory safeguarding risk assessments in every school (recommendation 6)93
• place school safeguarding officers in every government school (recommendation 7)94
• improve teacher training and professional development (recommendations 8 and 9)95
• improve the ability of staff to identify and report concerning behaviour (recommendations 10 and 11)96
• develop a formal code of conduct to allow disciplinary action against staff (recommendation 12)97
• integrate student safeguarding policies so their position in the Department’s set of safeguarding policies is clear (recommendations 13, 14 and 15; recommendation 15 is the same as recommendation 11)98
• develop protocols to respond to different types of sexual abuse (recommendation 16)99
• improve interagency relationships between police and the then Department of Communities through memorandums of understanding (recommendations 17 and 18)100
• improve public accessibility to policies (recommendations 19 and 20)101
• complete a systems review after all significant sexual abuse incidents to continually improve prevention and response (recommendation 21).102

1. The Department’s response to the Independent Education Inquiry

The Department accepted all 20 of the Independent Education Inquiry’s recommendations.103 A publicly available table outlining the Department’s planned implementation timeframe for the recommendations indicates that most were to be completed in either 2022 or 2023.104 In a statement on 10 May 2022, Secretary Bullard provided us with a table outlining the work undertaken so far and the work that is planned in respect of each recommendation. This document indicates that recommendations 16 (response protocols), 17 (partnership with police) and 21 (system reviews to be conducted following an incident of child sexual abuse) have been completed.105

The Department told us that it had ‘taken immediate action’ to implement recommendation 5 (to establish a Director of Safeguarding) and that it had appointed Elizabeth Jack to the position of Executive Director of Safeguarding.106

The Department also stated that it has completed one other recommendation —recommendation 19 (improving public access to information about student safeguarding). The Department said this recommendation was satisfied by including on its website ‘pages and information relating specifically to Safeguarding Children and Young people’.107 The Department told us it will continue to update its website.108 In Chapter 6, we discuss how the Department has generally improved access to safeguarding information.

Secretary Bullard provided us with another update in September 2022 on the Department’s progress on implementing the Independent Education Inquiry’s recommendations. While not specifically linking the Department’s work on implementation to particular recommendations, the Secretary told us that the Department’s ‘activity in relation to the recommendations’ included:

• consulting on a draft policy framework for safeguarding children and young people
• revising current policies and procedures ‘to incorporate relevant information on safeguarding children and young people from the harm of abuse, including Mandatory Reporting, Grievance Resolution, Duty of Care, IT Conditions of Use, Work with Vulnerable People, Family Violence, and Billeting Students in Australia and Overseas’
• revising an online mandatory reporting training module
• working on embedding safeguarding officers in government schools
• engaging with the University of Tasmania on incorporating ‘material on understanding, preventing, and responding to child sexual abuse, and trauma-informed practice in teacher training courses’
• developing a ‘safeguarding professional learning module’
• improving the operation of the Department’s case management platform to incorporate integrated ‘safeguarding-focused recording, reporting, and monitoring capability’
• reviewing the Department’s complaints and grievances processes to improve access by ‘children and young people, parents/carers and the community’
• developing an external website with information for children and young people as well as parents and carers about abuse, including signs of abuse and where to go for help.109

Secretary Bullard told us that the system review conducted in response to a child sexual abuse incident in 2022 recommended improvements across several areas of the Department’s procedures and responses.110 He said the Department is using existing resources to finish implementing the system review recommendations, but that there is overlap between these recommendations and those of the Independent Education Inquiry, as well as other work underway in the Office of Safeguarding.111 We discuss this system review in Chapter 6.

In addition to allocating departmental resources to implement the ‘system review’ recommendations, Secretary Bullard told us that ‘additional funding has … been allocated through the State Budget process to support rollout of the recommendations’.112 This includes:

• $26.1 million over four years from 2022–23 and $9.7 million ongoing to appoint Safeguarding Officers in every government school
• $2.6 million over four years from 2022–23 and $600,000 ongoing for mandatory professional development for all departmental staff towards understanding, preventing and responding to child sexual abuse in schools
• $1.27 million over two years from 2022–23 to provide more support for children and young people affected by harmful sexual behaviours, including four full-time- equivalent senior support staff with specialist expertise
• $3.8 million over four years from 2022–23 and $1.68 million ongoing to employ additional psychologists and social workers to directly support schools
• $2.6 million over three years from 2022–23 to fully staff the Office of Safeguarding to meet the demands of the work required to support all safeguarding-related activity across the Department.113

The 2022–23 State Budget states that resourcing for the following Independent Education Inquiry recommendations will come from the Department’s existing resources:114

• Recommendation 7—all schools should appoint a school staff person to the role of Safeguarding Officer. This includes allocating $26 million for 72 full-time-equivalent positions across all schools.115
• Recommendation 9—training for principals, teachers and assistants should include information about understanding, preventing, identifying and responding to child sexual abuse.
• Recommendation 10—developing training materials, instructions and guidelines for teachers and support staff in relation to ‘reporting and recording concerns about staff and student behaviour that may be relevant to preventing sexual abuse, but that fall below the threshold required by the Department’s Mandatory Reporting Procedures’.116

In April 2023, the Department released Safe. Secure. Supported. Our Safeguarding Framework, which sets out an ‘overarching approach to safeguarding children and young people from abuse’.117 Through this framework, the Department may have begun addressing some of our recommendations in this volume, but we could not fully consider this, given that we had ended the inquiry stage of our Commission of Inquiry when the framework was released. We have retained our recommendations considering this.

1. Conclusion

In this chapter, we have described the Tasmanian education system, focusing particularly on children in government schools. We have also discussed the recent Independent Education Inquiry and the Government’s response to this. In the following chapter—Chapter 5—we present case studies that highlight the challenges the Department faces in preventing and responding effectively to child sexual abuse in schools.