The Australian education industry is consistently bombarded with new legislation, regulation and guidance almost every month, so it would not be surprising to find schools suffering 'regulation-fatigue', particularly schools in Victoria.
Over the past 12 months there have been enormous changes in the compliance obligations of Victorian schools. The introduction of criminal offences was a major step for ‘the Education State’, and of course, the new Victorian Child Safe Standards that enforce seven minimum standards (Standards) relating to child protection were introduced and now apply to all organisations that provide child-related services in Victoria.
The Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA) released further guidance last month relating to Standard 6 of the Child Safe Standards: 'Strategies to identify and reduce or remove risks of child abuse' (VRQA Guidance).
Child protection risk management
Standard 6 requires a school to develop, implement, monitor and evaluate risk management strategies to ensure child safety in school environments.'
Risk management should not be a new concept for schools across Australia as workplace or occupational health and safety legislation already requires schools to identify hazards in the workplace, conduct risk assessments and implement risk controls. However, this is the first time that Victorian schools have been asked to apply these principles of risk management to an area that is quite complex - child protection.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recognises that child protection risk management, while an excellent and noble idea in theory, is often a difficult theory to put into practice. The Royal Commission commissioned and funded a research project that produced a report titled 'Hear no evil, see no evil: Understanding failure to identify and report child sexual abuse in institutional contexts' (the Report), which identified a series of organisational factors that overwhelmingly contributed to child abuse going unreported. This included an organisation's failure to appropriately address risk management.
The Report states that as a first step to reduce the risk of harm of abuse, an organisation will create a child protection policy. This is a natural way for a school to define its approach and strategy for reducing the risk of child abuse. In fact Standard 2 of the Standards requires that a school has a child safe policy (or statement of commitment to child safety).
However the Report goes on to explain that schools will often stop at this first step, unsure of where to go next in terms of developing and implementing other risk management strategies.
The new VRQA Guidance
The VRQA Guidance divides Standard 6 into five requirements which can be summarised as follows:
- Develop and implement child protection risk management strategies;
- Identify and mitigate child abuse risks in all school environments and activities;
- Implement detailed record keeping;
- Monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the school’s risk management systems; and
- Provide annual child protection risk management training to all governors and staff.
The latest VRQA Guidance is incredibly detailed and will become an excellent resource for schools unsure of what a 'risk management approach' to child protection looks like.
But for schools who have never engaged in risk management to this degree (implementing child protection risk audits, risk registers, risk controls, reviews and residual risk ratings) this document may result in more stress and confusion than anything else. For example, the VRQA Guidance requires a school to encompass ‘predatory, opportunistic and situational environment risks’ in their risk management strategies which may not be categories of risk that schools have previously considered.
In spite of any stress or confusion the VRQA Guidelines may cause, schools must be proactive about risk management because the VRQA has updated its Guidelines to the minimum standards and other requirements for registration of schools including those offering senior secondary courses to include the Standards as a registration requirement for schools.
This means that for the first time, the concept of child protection risk management is a registration requirement. That said, schools should not panic as it is unclear from these updated guidelines how the VRQA will assess a school's risk management strategies - meaning that a school's non-compliance may not (at least initially) have consequences for registration.
The bar has been set very high
The Guidance is extremely descriptive and essentially requires schools to develop a complex risk management system relating specifically to child protection, to address all risks of child abuse within their school environments and activities. While this will require a great deal of work for schools, it is achievable and hard work now will only benefit a school and its students.
However, the VRQA Guidance goes a step further than merely prescribing schools to develop a risk management system to identify child abuse risks. The VRQA Guidance requires that where a child abuse or child safety risk has been identified, and its rating is more than an 'acceptable level', further risk management resources and controls need to be implemented because "for child safety, there should be little or no tolerance of risk". This requirement is concerning as it is unrealistic.
There will always be risks in the school setting; it is not possible to eliminate all risks, especially relating to child protection and safety.
Other States and Territories around Australia should also take note of Victoria’s regime as it is likely that similar schemes will be rolled out across the country, with the ACT, Queensland and South Australia already having some form of ‘child-safe’ standard or regime. For more information about this increasing trend, see our earlier article explaining the need for Child Protection Officers in schools here.
The importance of effective risk management, particularly in the child protection sphere, cannot be overstated. However with the brand new, resource-heavy risk management framework introduced by the Victorian Government, the task ahead for Victorian schools is a mammoth one.
