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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-11-14 Daily Xml
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EDUCATION (MISCELLANEOUS) AMENDMENT BILL

Introduction and First Reading

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (16:33): Obtained leave and Introduced a bill for an act to amend the Education Act 1972. Read a first time.

Second Reading

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (16:34): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I rise to support the second reading of the bill, which seeks to amend the Education Act for two major purposes: first, to ensure that the Minister for Education and Child Development is immediately, or at worst within 24 hours, notified of any incident in public schools involving an alleged sexual offence against a child; and, secondly, for the establishment of an education ombudsman. First, regarding ministerial notification of alleged sexual offences, the Premier made a ministerial statement to the parliament on the morning of 13 November 2012, apologising to parents for the government's failure to notify them of the presence of a sex offender in their school community. He said:

There is no doubt parents should have been informed; I am sorry they were not and I have apologised on behalf of the government. The fact it was not disclosed has led to much suffering.

This cannot happen again. Family First wants to see families put first, not the interests of departmental staff or the offender themselves. We would all agree that children must be protected.

It is not good enough for a minister to receive notification from their staff of allegations of a serious incident constituting a sexual offence against a child and for the staff member to then not tell the minister. Yes, there are lots of things that come to a minister's office and I know that staff members, from my own experience as a minister, are extremely overworked. However, I also know that you need to focus on child protection. As a government you have a priority to those notifications, in my opinion, and in response to that notification the question of whether parents ought to be notified of the risk that their child might have been abused, or could be if certain circumstances continue.

In addition to the inquiry of former Justice Debelle and the pre-existing ombudsman investigation into the incident (and possibly others like it), the Premier announced yesterday that a task force of police, education, health and government law officials would look into whether incidents of child abuse have gone unrecorded to parents.

As honourable members would know, in the past Family First has obtained critical incident reports from the department of education and children's services, now the Department for Education and Child Development. However, I must say that it seems more difficult now to get that information from the department, even through FOI. Those reports routinely note that the subagency, known as School Care within DECD, staffed by three individuals and with a flat budget over the last four years, regularly notes the reports received by them, but it is not clear what senior action is taken, for example, whether the School Care subagency of the Department for Education and Child Development has notified the minister.

Before moving on to the ombudsman aspect of this bill, I refer honourable members back to my speech introducing an earlier different version of this legislation on 4 March 2009—the education ombudsman and school discipline bill. This bill is different in some respects when it comes to the notification about sexual offence allegations, but otherwise it is largely similar.

With respect to the second component of this, the education ombudsman, the South Australian Association of State School Organisations (SAASSO) support establishing an education ombudsman. They say that around two-thirds of OECD countries have an education ombudsman or an agency to receive complaints relating to public schools and, more specifically, Washington state in the United States of America is a lead example of an independent education ombudsman, and continues to have such an office to this day.

I spoke in March 2009 about their experience and will not repeat that now. The local government ombudsman in the United Kingdom was given power to act as an education ombudsman. However, that power was taken away two years later in July this year. However, another independent agency called Ofsted, which investigates schools, was last October given power to investigate schools based on anonymous tip-offs by parents on issues of behaviour, management and teaching quality—or anything else for that matter. So, the United Kingdom does continue to have an independent means for issues at public schools to be investigated.

Washington DC—not Washington state, but the District of Columbia and the United States capital—had an education ombudsman, but after the first appointee quit after 14 months it was defunded and there are now calls for it to be reinstated. The budgets of the United Kingdom and the American states have been in a somewhat worse state than we have here, but I will come to the funding solution for South Australia in a moment.

The education minister here has seen fit to set up a Parent Complaints Unit. The unit received 282 complaints in its first five months, roughly three complaints every school day since it began, with over half handballed back to the school or regional office it came from. Contrast that with the state Ombudsman's work in the education context; he is finding that in about 20 per cent of cases he can make findings that are adverse to the department or has identified alternative remedies with other bodies, or resolved the issue with the cooperation of the agency.

By contrast, the Parent Complaints Unit is making similar findings only 5 per cent of the time. This is not an independent or effective system. However, the Parent Complaint Unit is funded. We could see the transfer of that funding line in the budget to that of an education ombudsman's office and get a guarantee of continuing funding for that office, probably without the government having to provide any additional resources in the foreseeable future.

If the education ombudsman's office does a good job, as I expect, then hopefully messages would go through the agency, policies would change, reporting processes would be better and we may not ever need to fund it with any more staff than that amount. What is more, we can also shift the resourcing allocation of the state Ombudsman, who currently handles education issues, and redirect that to the resourcing of the education ombudsman. Therefore, I argue that funding should not be an issue.

Like I say, we cannot be blasé. There needs to be commitment long term to an ombudsman so that they can build awareness of their role and responsiveness to complaints that come their way. The Health and Community Services Complaints Commissioner had a difficult history under its predecessor, but has not had the same level of complaints since it was brought somewhat into the operation of the state Ombudsman's office to get it up and running.

I believe the health department has made a saving on the previous million dollar plus annual cost of running the commissioner separate from the state Ombudsman by bringing it into his office, so there are also funding capabilities that could be there. It could be that an education ombudsman could similarly leverage off the data management and other office resources of the existing Ombudsman's office. There need not be a reinvention of the complaints handling wheel or competition between the offices.

I welcome the fact that the Liberal Party supports us having an education ombudsman and I also acknowledge that it has a similar policy. Let us hope that we do not end up with disagreement over the model getting in the way of actually getting one set up. I also note some of the media are supportive of an education ombudsman.

I have listened to my colleagues in this council with interest and, of course, the government as it conducts investigations into its complaints handling and parental notification procedures in alleged sexual abuse cases. As I did with the Victims of Crime (Miscellaneous) Amendment Bill, I have made this a miscellaneous bill so as to enable the parliament to provide other amendments on the subject of education. We need to have a debate about how to improve mechanisms to assist families in their interactions with the public education system. I commend the bill to the council.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. K.J. Maher.

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS: Mr President, I draw your attention to the state of the council.

A quorum having been formed:

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