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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-10-16 Daily Xml
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CHILD PROTECTION

The Hon. R.B. SUCH (Fisher) (14:38): Can the Minister for Education outline what measures are in place to protect children in our schools to ensure that our children and grandchildren are safe? With the recent coverage in the media one would get the impression that our children and grandchildren are at risk in our schools. I would like the minister to outline the various measures and mechanisms that are in place to ensure that our children can learn in a safe, caring environment.

The Hon. J.M. RANKINE (Wright—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (14:39): Sir, I do not know that I have got enough time in the four minutes that are allocated to outline all of the measures that are in place to protect our children and/or initiatives that we have put in place since we have been in government. I think one of the very important measures that we put in place was, of course, the regular criminal history checks of teachers.

When we came into government new teachers were receiving criminal history checks but there were something like, I think, 30,000 teachers in the system who had never had a criminal history check. That is now a requirement every three years and, as I have announced, we hope to have in place by the start of the new school year background screening checks through the Department for Communities and Social Inclusion. So, not only will we have an assurance that teachers have not been convicted of a criminal offence but they will have had a background screening to ensure that there have not been other inappropriate activities that have not resulted in a criminal conviction with teachers in our schools.

Of course, we also put our children through training in keeping themselves safe, and that is a requirement that schools provide for our students so that they understand how they can keep themselves safe. One of the great problems and dilemmas that I think we all face in our community and in the education department—in public education I think there are about 166,000 students in our system over 500 schools—is, on any given day, how do you guarantee that any child in our community, whether it is in school or in any other aspect of community life, remains safe?

We have put many things in place. We have introduced mechanisms where parents are visited at home when they have newborn babies. We have introduced new legislation—the child protection legislation—which requires people who are working with children to have criminal history and background screening checks and that volunteers who are involved with our children are checked so that they are not unnecessarily exposed.

We have many sporting groups, and I know there was a great deal of concern when the legislation was introduced that there would be unnecessary imposts on volunteers in ensuring that we had confidence that they were proper and appropriate people to be involved with our children. We have more than doubled the number of social workers working in the Department for Families and Communities. There are many things that we have done. We have increased by hundreds of millions of dollars the budget for the Department for Families and Communities, our teachers have training in mandatory reporting, and the list goes on.

Unfortunately, however, there are circumstances where people have evil intent and will try to undermine the very best systems that you can have in place. By the start of next year, hopefully we will have even stronger measures in place to ensure that those with evil intent against our children are weeded out of any system.

The SPEAKER: A further supplementary from the Leader of the Opposition.

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