The Federal Government's (Government) move to create a new Children's e-safety Commissioner will be hastened in light of new research showing that teachers are losing teaching time to the management of cyber-bullying complaints. The Herald Sun reports that new research shows Australian high schools are dealing with an average of 22 cyber-bullying incidents each year (and these are just the incidents being reported). These reported incidents often involve serious cases requiring police involvement.

We've written several articles on the topic of cyber-bullying and the increasing importance of educating teachers, children and parents on its dangers and how to prevent it from occurring.  The release of these new statistics highlights the difficulty that schools, their executives and teachers are encountering when trying to balance their duty to ensure their students' safety with their duty to educate.  The Herald Sun quotes the Parliamentary Secretary for Communications Mr Paul Fletcher as expressing concern that cyber-bullying is creating 'a substantial new workload for principals and teachers'.

And as the recent Victorian Supreme Court decision awarding a former teacher with $1.3 million in damages for stress caused by his job demonstrates, teachers are struggling enough as it is with the workload and emotional demands that come with their profession without having the additional responsibility of managing issues which may occur outside the classroom.

The physical safety of children in school grounds is traditionally the responsibility of schools, but what has happened is children are now communicating very extensively online and on social media, and those engagements have gone well beyond school boundaries, and schools have been faced with a very big new responsibility,' Mr Fletcher is quoted as saying.

The creation of the Children's e-safety Commissioner (Commissioner) as part of its Enhancing Online Safety for Children policy may not be the panacea the Government hopes for either, given the ambiguity surrounding its role and powers and the rapidly developing world of social media and smartphone technologies. Once established, the Government foresees that the Commissioner will take a national leadership role in online safety for children by:

• administering the funding for online safety programmes in schools and research and information campaigns on online safety; and
• being responsible for improved coordination of the content and messages provided to children, families, schools and child protection agencies.

Hopefully the safety programmes will deliver the education required to reduce the number of cyber-bullying incidents being dealt with by schools.  That said, its likely that the requirements for teachers to hold regular cyber-bullying resolution sessions will continue for the foreseeable future. This highlights the need for schools to put in place clear cyber safety strategies and ensure that their teaching staff are well trained to implement these strategies.