Wednesday, 2 April 2025

Ombudsman

Support when Children Are Sexually Abused at School: The Department of Education’s Response to Abuse in a Victorian Primary School

Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:19): The report I rise to speak on is due to my desire to emphasise the four remaining recommendations from the Victorian Ombudsman’s investigation report Support when Children Are Sexually Abused at School of February 2025, which was tabled on 18 February this year. The report was initiated by the Ombudsman in relation to complaints about how the Department of Education and a Victorian primary school responded to allegations of sexual abuse of two children by a teacher, and it is disturbing reading. The education department, as we understand it now, has put into place new actions and policies commissioned by the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office to investigate systems and processes, create teams with specialised staff and formally apologise to the families affected. But the really sad part about this is about how long the process has taken. It is more than 10 years from when the offence took place to when the department finally issued an apology to the first child.

The report raised serious issues about how the child involved had little support or advice on how to manage the allegations, which ultimately led to actions that did not comply to meet Victoria’s child safe standards. Outrageously, the first report, which included the staff eyewitness report and the interview of abuse, was not provided to the parents, who only became aware of the incident and that their child was interviewed three years later. How could this even have occurred? The interview of the first child was found to have been conducted inappropriately, highlighting the fact that the school’s staff did not have the necessary experience to handle this type of interview with a child. Consequently, the child did not disclose any abuse because of the inexperienced questioning by staff, which subsequently resulted in a finding of no teacher wrongdoing. Sadly, there was no immediate or ongoing support for the child or the family, which left the family to deal with this terrible situation and forced them to seek help elsewhere.

With the second case of abuse the child had moved school, disclosed abuse directly to police, received no direct contact by the education department and only heard from the school four years after the disclosure. It was made clear that the information provided to parents was not adequate, with the first child’s family receiving the letter drafted by the department about the teacher’s arrest at the same time it was provided to all the school families.

After another disturbing incident records show that the families of the children affected were eventually told of the teacher’s arrest and conviction, but there was no effort by the school to ascertain whether there were any other potential victims, and no internal review of its response to the disclosures was made by the department as was required by departmental policy.

I am raising this to ensure that the four recommendations made by the Ombudsman that need to be addressed are formalised into some direct action now. I know from having worked in schools that there are child safety methods of teaching and training staff and that there are some of these things taking place, but I do want the minister to ensure that these are taking place in all schools. These four recommendations have been made and are intended to ensure support is provided to child victim- survivors, their families and all affected parties as soon as practical to ensure school and other department staff are aware of the ‘no wrong door’ approach to reporting child abuse allegations and that all allegations should be forwarded to the conduct and integrity division specifically formed to receive and manage child abuse allegations. The third recommendation is to place responsibility on senior department officers to oversight child safety, and the fourth is to ensure the department’s accountability by publicly reporting the number of child abuse allegations made each year.

I hope the Minister for Education can ensure the house that these remaining recommendations are safely being put into place in all schools, as this should not happen again to any child in our school system. According to the report, the Commission for Children and Young People received 611 allegations about sexual misconduct and sexual offences in the education sector in 2023–24. I say this because I think this is an incredibly important report, and when I was reading it I just could not believe that three years after the eyewitness report and six years after the teacher began abusing a child at the school the first child disclosed the abuse, and it was not because the child had not attempted to try to say something before, but they simply were not given the mechanisms in which to do that.

I do encourage people to have a read of this particular report and to have a look at its recommendations. I do encourage the minister to ensure that all schools are reinforcing this and that all teachers are getting the training and support that they need, as well as the students and their families.