Ministerial Statement

Pinery Bushfires

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for the Public Sector) (14:05): I seek leave to make a ministerial statement.

Leave granted.

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE: As with all major fires threatening our schools and preschools, the Department for Education and Child Development has undertaken a preliminary review of events as they unfolded during the Pinery fire on 25 November 2015. A full review and debrief will be undertaken in term 1, 2016.

This post-incident review looked at actions taken by schools and preschools during the fire, as well as the effectiveness of existing policies and procedures to identify any immediate improvements that can be made. First, I am pleased to report that there were no injuries to our students or staff, and damage was limited to minor aesthetic repairs and smoke-related cleaning of school areas. However, many of our staff and students were directly affected by damage to their homes and properties and through the loss of crops and livestock.

Support staff have been made available to affected schools and preschools to provide counselling and other support as required. I am advised that early indications from the review show that DECD policies and procedures regarding bushfire management and response were followed. The department is taking a further detailed look at the response by Wasleys Primary School, with the intention of identifying systems gaps and further areas for improvement.

The department and its staff take their duty of care requirements very seriously, and every effort will be made to learn from any errors made during the Pinery fire emergency. This will include consideration of the specific training needs of DECD staff in emergency management. A number of initial immediate areas for development have been identified that will assist the department and sites to respond to any future live emergency incidents.

I would like to highlight that none of the schools and preschools operating on the day of the fire were categorised as being a high bushfire risk, so they do not traditionally have bushfire-specific processes in place and utilise their emergency procedures. Areas for development include introducing additional communication methods; for example, electronic SMS warnings for when a large number of sites need to be contacted. The department is also considering satellite telephone services for our highest risk sites to counter public communication infrastructure issues that occurred during the Pinery fire.

The department will also consider enforced closures of schools in affected areas after a bushfire has started in the local area or a major emergency has occurred, based on advice from the local education director, school principal or preschool director. This has traditionally been decided centrally. However, the absence of reliable communications with site leaders and uncertainty around safety and accessibility of the area made this difficult during the Pinery fire.

The department has robust bushfire response processes for its high-risk schools, but the Pinery bushfire has illustrated the potential for any regional school or preschool to be at risk. The annual end of fire-danger season review will reconsider system responses for all our schools to ensure that any areas of improvement are implemented for future seasons.