The information in the Weekly Wrap is aggregated from other news sources to provide you with news that is relevant to the education sector across Australia and worldwide. Each paragraph is a summary of the subject matter covered in the particular news article. The information does not necessarily reflect the views of CompliSpace.
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The Albanese Government has announced that it will help protect faith-based places with a new $40 million grants program to improve security and safety. Grants will be available for places of worship, religious schools and associated organisations to support safety upgrades, such as fencing, lighting, security cameras, traffic barriers, alarm systems, access controls and security guards. The new Securing Faith-Based Places grants program will be an open, competitive and merit-based program. The Auditor-General found that grants under the former program were only “partly effective and partly consistent with the Commonwealth Grant Rules and Guidelines” and “funding decisions were not appropriately informed by departmental briefings”. The Securing Faith-Based Places grants program will open for applications in July 2023. Details will be published on the Australian Government’s GrantConnect website at https://help.grants.gov.au.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a bullet smashed through a Sydney school classroom window with Year 1 and 2 students inside in a “totally reckless” daylight shooting on Tuesday afternoon, police say. Campbelltown police were called to Macquarie Fields Public School in the city’s south-west at 12.45pm on Tuesday after reports that a window had been broken by a metal projectile. A teacher and the students heard the window smash, but the bullet was stopped by the blinds inside the classroom window. Police said that the bullet had just enough velocity to smash the window. “It’s a totally reckless act by someone who’s acting in a way with a firearm that is very dangerous to the community,” Detective Superintendent Grant Healey told media. “Early investigations reveal the projectile may have come from some distance away.” Students and staff at the school were unharmed. NSW Police have asked for anyone with information to come forward.
The Age reports that Children have been rescued from a school bus that was caught in a gutter in regional Victoria. The Country Fire Authority (CFA) was called to the high-angle rescue on Meeniyan-Promontory Road at Fish Creek about 8.20am last Thursday. The authority said that the school bus was believed to be on the side of the road in a gutter. The children remained on the bus until another one arrived and the group was transferred with no injuries. The incident was brought under control just after 9am. The CFA had two vehicles on the scene. It came one week after a school bus rolled in Melbourne’s western fringe, seriously injuring about a dozen Exford Primary School pupils, including one whose arm was severed.
According to news.com.au, three teenage girls have admitted that they are so addicted to vapes that they sneak puffs inside the classroom and get withdrawals without them. It comes as a shocking new report confirmed fears that disposable vapes contained dangerous chemicals, such as lead and formaldehyde. The three students admitted that knowing that e-cigarettes contained harmful chemicals was not enough for them to kick their addiction. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk ordered the groundbreaking report on vapes after growing concerns that the “lolly” flavoured vapes were appealing to children. The chemical composition of 17 vape samples formed part of the lab study. All of the samples were found to contain formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, the former being classified with the potential to cause cancer in humans. Arsenic and zinc were also found to be present in all of the e-liquids.
National Reconciliation Week began on Saturday 27 May, calling all Australians to: Be a Voice for Generations. This week, NESA is running a range of staff activities to enable staff to stay meaningfully connected to NESA’s work supporting improved learning outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and children.
NESA’s new Reconciliation Action Plan will be announced later in 2023, which builds on its current reconciliation goals, including:
According to the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA), all NSW non-government schools are required to produce, publicly disclose and submit electronically to NESA a 2022 annual report by 30 June 2023. Annual reporting requirements are detailed in section 3.10.1 of the Registered and Accredited Individual Non-government Schools (NSW) Manual and section 5.10.1 of the Registration Systems and Member Non-government Schools (NSW) Manual. NESA’s review of the annual reports submitted in 2022 found that the following areas commonly required improvement:
Schools should consider these areas for improvement in finalising their reports for the 2022 school year. Submission of annual reports is via NESA’s registration website RANGS Online.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that two backpack-wearing school children were thrown into the Lane Cove River when the ferry dropping them at Riverview College Wharf floated so far away from the pontoon that the gangplank collapsed into the water. As the children were flailing in the water, the rope tying the private contractor’s boat to the wharf snapped, the life ring floated away because it also wasn’t attached to a rope, and the out-of-control ferry almost hit the river bank. Amid concerns that the public transport safety watchdog did not do its own probe into the incident, Transport Minister Jo Haylen asked the Transport Department for an independent investigation. The school wrote to SafeWork, saying that it was concerned about the incident happening again due to issues such as staff who “did not know how to dock and secure the ferry properly”, incorrect safety equipment, and “keeping to schedule over safety of passengers”.
ABC News reports that education advocates are calling for urgent legislation of boarding standards amid fresh child mistreatment claims at an outback Queensland hostel. First Nations children who boarded at the Alice River Student Hostel in Barcaldine have told the ABC that they were abused and assaulted, poorly fed, left in the care of other children, and forced to work for free in the operator's tourist business. The facility is one of 280 boarding providers around the country that receive a share of more than $170 million in federal subsidies through ABSTUDY to support Indigenous children studying away from home. There is no mandated qualification for workers at boarding facilities and no providers are required to meet legislated minimum standards in terms of quality of care they provide children. Boarding Training Australia chief executive Steve Florisson said that without legislated standards providers would continue to run with little oversight.
According to 7news, the parents of a special needs primary school student have slammed the South Australian Department for Education over the way it handled the investigation and aftermath of their son’s choking death. Lucas Latouche Mazzei was a five-year-old student of Henley Beach Primary School when he died in 2017 as a result of choking on a nectarine stone. The SA Deputy Coroner Ian White handed down his final report on Friday and found that Lucas’s death was preventable. In his criticism of the school, White said that staff did not have adequate first-aid training at the time, and that the Department for Education failed to independently investigate Lucas’s death. White made several recommendations to the Department, including that all teaching staff be required to hold up-to-date qualifications in providing first aid. He also recommended that the Department review its policy and procedures around the storage and consumption of food and drinks at school.
ABC News reports that WA Premier Mark McGowan says that it was lucky no one was killed when shots were fired at a Perth school recently. A 15-year-old boy was arrested at the scene. The teenager allegedly fired three shots at Atlantis Beach Baptist College, and he remains in police custody as detectives try to piece together what happened. Visiting the school, Mr McGowan described the shooting as "the sort of thing that you see on television in the United States". The school was placed into lockdown and students and staff sheltered in classrooms, with several pupils including a 12-year-old ringing triple-0 and providing valuable information for first responders. The WA premier thanked the staff and students for their "calmness under pressure" and said that the school practised lockdown protocols twice a year. Mr McGowan said that the Government was moving quickly to reform gun laws in the State, which he said will be the toughest in the country.
According to WA today, Western Australian school principals have been instructed to stop asking contractors on site for Working With Children Checks, after an increase in requests hindered the completion of repairs or upgrades. The Department of Education sent a notice to principals in January after it was observed that more contractors working on school grounds were being asked to apply for the check. “Schools are reminded that building and maintenance contractors are not required to have a Working With Children Check,” the notice said. The notice went on to state that anyone who applied for a check when they were not legally recognised as being in child-related work would not have their applications processed, or their application fee refunded, which was causing issues for contractors. WA Primary Principals Association president Niel Smith said that principals were often caught between following the guidelines and trying to ensure their students were safe.
ABC News reports that a fire in a school dormitory in Guyana that killed 19 children was lit by a student after school authorities confiscated her mobile phone, police say. "A female student is suspected of having set the devastating fire because her cellular phone was taken away by the dorm's mother and a teacher," police said in a statement. David Adams, the mayor of Mahdia, the town where the school is located, earlier confirmed the student's alleged involvement to Reuters and said she was not injured in the fire. Minister of Education Priya Manickchand earlier declined to discuss the student's alleged involvement. Asked about allegations that the dormitory was not outfitted with a modern fire alarm system and that students were not trained in fire drills, Ms Manickchand said that "all of that is under investigation". President Irfaan Ali met with some parents of the deceased after visiting Mahdia's hospital and declared three days of national mourning.
According to CPR News, a student set to graduate is suing her school district for refusing her request to wear a sash featuring the flags of both the United States and Mexico. Naomi Peña Villasano, 18, has for weeks lobbied school officials to allow her to wear the sash that was given to her by one of her brothers. School officials denied the request, citing graduation attire policies that limit personal expression to decorations on the mortar boards of graduates’ caps. The lawsuit claims that by not allowing Peña Villasano to wear the sash, the school district was violating her First and 14th Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution. The filing says that the policy not only violates Peña Villasano’s freedom of speech rights under federal law, but also the Colorado State Constitution. In a third count, the lawsuit points to a 2006 Colorado statute that guarantees school district employees and students the right to “display reasonably the flag of the United States.”