The NSW Education Minister announced this week that all NSW schools, including non-government schools, would be subject to a new protocol aimed at improving communication between schools about students who have been expelled.
In the media release issued by the Department of Education (Department), Minister for Education Adrian Piccoli stated that the needs of students moving between schools and into different education sectors will be better served by a clear protocol to guarantee relevant student information is shared by schools. The protocol has not been publicly released.
While the Department has the power to regulate how government schools discipline their students, it does not have a similar power over non-government schools, who are instead required by the NSW Registration Manual to have policies in place based on procedural fairness. And unlike government schools, non-government schools are not required to report the disciplinary actions they take to the Department, meaning that government schools, and the public, have no insight into the frequency at which expulsions and suspensions occur in those schools.
The new protocol between public, Catholic and independent schools will represent a new collaborative approach to one part of the disciplinary process.
Mr Piccoli believes that the protocol between the three education sectors will benefit schools by:
Records relating to the reasons for a student's expulsion will contain personal information about that student. As we know from our previous articles, government and non-government schools are subject to different privacy law obligations and what might be legal for government schools may not be legal for non-government schools.
The sharing of personal information between different schools could raise concerns about the protection of student privacy. Non-government schools are required to have privacy programs in place under the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and government schools such as those in NSW have similar obligations under the Information Privacy Principles in the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (NSW). The Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 (NSW) may also apply to a student's disciplinary records if health information is included.
Mr Piccoli addressed this risk in the press release, which stated that the 'information sharing between principals and schools continues to be protected by safeguards'.
'The guidelines in the protocol more clearly establish what information is covered by laws that balance privacy protection with health, safety, welfare and wellbeing issues for students and staff', Mr Piccoli said.
The move will give further impetus to all non-government schools to have a privacy program in place by the time the protocol is in force. Schools that do not currently have such a program may risk breaching privacy obligations owed to students when they participate under the protocol.
Mr Piccoli's new protocol is an interesting development in his views on how the issue of student expulsion from NSW schools should be handled. Earlier this year Mr Piccoli criticised the approach non-government schools take when expelling students. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported that Mr Piccolo believed that non-government schools prioritised their reputations over the social and education welfare of their students by expelling problem students too quickly. Mr Piccoli's comments were made in response to the decision of a private boys school to expel eight students following an incident involving drugs on school grounds. According to the SMH article, Mr Piccoli believes that non-government schools have a duty to help their students rather than 'just kick them out and allow it to become another school's problem'.
However Mr Piccoli's concerns around the reasons and rates behind student expulsion should not be restricted to non-government schools. In July 2014 the SMH reported that students were being expelled from NSW public schools at record rates, with Department figures showing a 35 per cent increase in the number of times students have been sent home for misbehaving over the past five years.
The protocol won't change the authority of non-government schools to expel its students in accordance with their own discipline procedures but the information sharing it promotes will hopefully allow schools to better accommodate students who come to them with behavioural problems and hopefully, reduce expulsion rates across all schools. Schools who inherit such students from other schools might be able to prevent them from experiencing further serious disciplinary action by using the information from their prior school to address and prevent their emotional or development issues and try to facilitate the fulfilment of their duty to educate them to the best of their ability.