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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-11-03 Daily Xml
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School Violence and Bullying

Mrs PEARCE (King) (14:56): My question is to the Minister for Education, Training and Skills. Can the minister update the house on how sporting clubs in the north-east are teaming up to help stamp out violence in our schools?

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (14:57): I thank the member for King for this important question and for her advocacy and hard work in her community and bringing that community—which is my community as well—together to tackle violence in schools. As members of this place no doubt will be aware, overall our schools are fantastic places.

Overwhelmingly, they are very, very safe places for our young people. One of the things I feel very fortunate to be able to do in this job every day is to get out to our early learning sites, child care, preschool, primary school, our TAFE sites, our RTOs and our high schools and see the fantastic work that our educators do on a daily basis. It is a really important reminder for me, as Minister for Education, of the fantastic work that happens every day in our education system here in South Australia.

However, there are some cases of course where a minority of students—and I stress that it is a minority of students—behave in ways that are completely and utterly unacceptable. I must say that as Minister for Education I have absolutely zero tolerance for any kind of violence in any of our schools. Along with the chief executive of the department, Professor Martin Westwell, we have taken very strong action to respond to some of the recent incidents where violence has occurred whilst also focusing our attention on some of the longer term change that needs to be made, some of the cultural change that of course includes this government's election commitment to ban mobile phones in high school settings as well as the existing ban in primary school settings.

In recent times, the last few months, Golden Grove High School has been in the media with some pretty serious cases of violence there. I know that anyone in this place who saw that footage would have been shocked, as I was, in terms of the severity of those cases. We all know that there is a very long-lasting effect upon those who are the victims of violence like that and of bullying and it is something that we absolutely cannot tolerate.

The school has taken strong action in response to those incidents, and we have placed extra supports at the school. They are still there to this day, including a recently retired very senior principal who has gone in to provide extra leadership support. We have security guards in place, a behavioural specialist and a parent liaison, and I think they are starting collectively to turn things around. I am very pleased to speak today in this place about how the community more broadly in the north-east is also stepping up to take action.

The member for King has been doing some fantastic work about bringing together local sporting clubs who indicated they had an interest in being part of the solution to this violence. Golden Grove Football Club, the Modbury (Hawks) Football Club, the Tea Tree Gully football club and North East Hockey Club have all joined forces, thanks to the hard work of the member for King to bring them together, to play a role in encouraging good behaviour at our schools and making sure that the perpetrators of those violent acts do not get away scot-free and learn the severity of their actions.

These clubs collectively have come together and made a very strong statement that if any of the members of their individual clubs are found to be the ones perpetrating this violence, not just at Golden Grove High School but at other schools in the area, then they are going to take action to not allow them to play whatever it might be—hockey, football, tennis—on the weekend. I think that sends an incredibly strong message to young people at those schools, and to the broader community too, that this is something we have to all tackle together. I want to express my pride of local clubs in the north-eastern suburbs for standing up and being part of the solution.

One last thing I would like to say is that the actions of the member for King here really personify the role of a local member of parliament—to be part of the solution to bring together other people from their community to be actually part of that solution rather than sitting from the sidelines.

Time expired.

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