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.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) are encouraging the public to listen to the award-winning Closing The Net podcast series during National Child Protection Week this week to learn how to protect children from online sexual exploitation. National Child Protection Week started on 4 September and is held annually across Australia to raise awareness of child abuse prevention and all issues connected with child protection. With the prevalence of children and young people accessing the internet, online safety is becoming an increasing concern around the world. Research conducted by the AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) in 2020 revealed only about half of parents talked to their children about online safety. The AFP are working hard to change that by creating resources for parents, carers and teachers to showcase that knowledge is power with this crime type. The Closing The Net series highlights how quickly online predators can groom children.
According to The Australian, Catholic schools have been strongly advised not to assist in efforts to affirm gender transitions in students through the use of drugs or surgical interventions and that “a human being’s sex is a physical, biological reality”. The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference will advise schools that, for the vast majority of children and adolescents, “gender incongruence” is a psychological condition through which they will pass safely and naturally with supportive psychological care. The document is aimed at providing support and care to students. It makes no recommendations that would result in students being expelled because of their gender identity. The document recommends that schools provide unisex toilets or a change room area not aligned to biological sex to increase safety and options for vulnerable students. It also proposes to offer “flexibility with uniform expectations” to cater to the diversity of the student body.
The Educator reports that 7 September was Indigenous Literacy Day 2022, a day where the success of Indigenous children’s literacy outcomes is recognised and celebrated. The annual celebration features Aboriginal languages, stories and culture as a reminder of the importance of a connection to language, heritage and literacy for Indigenous communities. Gregg Dreise, a descendant of the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi Aboriginal Countries, is an artist, storyteller and musician who features the didgeridoo and guitar in his performances at schools, libraries and festivals. In his role as an Ambassador to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, Dreise’s focus is on donations to a charity that has supplied 636,000 books to over 400 remote communities across Australia. To coincide with Indigenous Literacy Day, the Sydney Opera House (SOH) hosted a free National Digital Event, called ‘Celebrating Stories, Cultures and Languages’, presented by the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
The Age reports that an increasing number of young children are creating and uploading their own sexually explicit material to the internet, prompting fears from child abuse investigators that they are putting themselves at risk of serious harm. Investigators say that they have discovered Australian children as young as six making their own content, with growing concerns that popular influencer-promoted websites such as OnlyFans are normalising making pornography for cash. Detective Acting Inspector Carla McIntyre, the officer in charge of the Joint Anti-Child Exploitation Team, said that police were now having tough conversations with parents after knocking on doors thinking they’re preventing children from harm, only to find the child was authoring their own exploitation material. She said that young people were increasingly being influenced by those online who promote sexualised behaviour on popular platforms in the belief that this was normal, safe behaviour.
According to The Courier Mail, kids should be given lessons in personal safety at school to protect them from being sexually assaulted or exploited by their peers, a charity says. Bravehearts – which raises awareness of child sexual abuse – says that it is an emerging issue and that the little research being done suggests that it is increasing. CEO Alison Geale said that the charity itself has a six-month waiting list for children – both boys and girls – who have been referred to one of its counselling programs because they have engaged in unhealthy sexual behaviour. Australian crime data shows that children and young people aged 10 to 19 were the alleged offenders in 20 per cent of sexual offences committed in 2019/2020. Meanwhile, the majority of child sexual abuse allegations occurring within an institutional location – most often a school – involved a minor as the person of interest.
According to The Educator, more states are starting to remove – not add – devices from the classroom as a result of too much screen time among children. The NSW Labor Party is the latest to propose this restriction as it looks to extend the ban on smartphones to high school students should it win the State election in March 2023, according to Sky News. The plan follows an online petition released in March where almost 25,000 signatories called for the NSW Department of Education to prohibit high schoolers from using phones at recess and lunch in favour of socially interacting with peers. Phones are already banned in most primary schools in the State, joining South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia in the fight against the use of mobile phones. Some schools like Loreto College Marryatville that have long implemented this restriction have reported several health, social and academic benefits as a result of the updated policy.
According to the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA), online disability provisions workshops are still available for teachers, executives and learning support personnel. The workshop will cover how to better understand the HSC Disability Provisions program, how to evaluate application submissions and how to ensure applications have appropriate supporting documentation. The last workshop for this year is 13 September at 3:30pm.
According to the Herald Sun, an exclusive all-girls’ school will rename one of their houses after stripping its old title, which was named after a controversial Australian figure. Melbourne Girls Grammar School (MGGS) is set to vote on a new house name to replace Batman House – formerly named after Melbourne founder John Batman. In 2020, MGGS students questioned whether Batman was an “appropriate name”. In a presentation, the cohort said that “John Batman was not only the broker of the notorious Batman Treaty but a participant in the Tasmanian ‘Black Wars’, which culminated in the murder of more than 1000 Aboriginal people.” The Treaty mentioned by students at the time referred to Batman’s offer to Indigenous leaders to buy land from them when he arrived in Port Phillip in 1835.
According to The Catholic Leader, Queensland Child Protection Week is under way (September 4-10) and the Archdiocese of Brisbane has thrown its support behind the 2022 theme “Protecting Children is Everybody’s Business”. Meanwhile, all parishes will observe Safeguarding Sunday in special liturgies on 11 September, acknowledging the immense damage caused by the past abuse of children within Catholic contexts. The Director of the Archdiocese of Brisbane’s Safeguarding Office, Mark Eustance, said that supporting and participating in the National Child Protection Week and Safeguarding Sunday campaigns continues to maintain the level of community awareness of child protection. In response to the landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Catholic Church in Australia has developed the National Catholic Safeguarding Standards.
According to The Australian, it will be harder for religious schools to fire LGBTIQ+ teachers under an overhaul of Queensland’s anti-discrimination laws being considered by the Palaszczuk Government. Queensland Human Rights Commissioner Scott McDougall has recommended that exemptions given to church-run schools that allow them to discriminate on the basis of sexuality, gender identity, marital status or pregnancy be narrowed. In a report tabled in Parliament recently, Mr McDougall recommended that the “genuine occupational requirement” for staff in religious schools to share its beliefs be replaced by a tighter definition. It would mean that staff not directly involved in religious education, such as science, maths and English teachers, would be better protected against discrimination. “A specific concern (from submissions) was that the current act requires employees to hide or suppress who they are in the workplace,” the report read.
The Age reports that police have described how predators are grooming Western Australian children across numerous online platforms following an operation that led to the rescue of three children from ongoing abuse, the identification of 14 more at risk and the arrest of 45 people thus far. After a seven-day child exploitation material blitz across Perth and regional WA, officers described the processes by which offenders operated, using multiple identities across platforms including Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook to befriend both boys and girls and convince them to share images of themselves – often innocent images at first. This would progress to sexualised images, that were then used to blackmail the children into self-producing extreme video content under the threat of the images being sent to their parents and friends – a sophisticated and swift repertoire of “sextortion” that amounted to “invading their bedrooms”.
According to the Western Australian Government, a man has been fined $4,000 and ordered to pay $10,000 in costs after being found guilty in the Mandurah Magistrates’ Court of two counts of knowingly providing false information to his employer about his Working With Children Card. The Court heard that the man was working in a key role in a sporting club in the South West and was required to hold a Working With Children Card to hold that position. A Department of Communities investigation found that when required by the club’s committee to provide proof that he held or had applied to renew his Working With Children Card, he provided falsified documents on two occasions. It is an offence under Section 35(a) of the Working With Children (Criminal Record Checking) Act 2004 (WA) for any person to knowingly give false or misleading information for the purposes of the Act, to any person who employs or proposes to employ the person in child-related employment.
According to newsroom.co.nz, The Detail podcast looked at what a board of trustees does, how much influence it has over a school and why, this year, there is some unease about candidates who may have other agendas. That includes white supremacist Philip Arps, who's put his name forward at a Christchurch college. New Zealand Principals Federation president Cherie Taylor-Patel says that the role of school boards is governance, not management. They're also the school's connection with the community, and that part of the job has increased since the pandemic – schools had to find out more about their pupils' lives so that they could learn from home. Being on a school board of trustees isn't going to make you rich – there's a small meeting stipend many members donate back to the school. Taylor-Patel says that there can be inequities between schools and socio-economic regions with the mix of people who end up on boards.
The Guardian reports that the number of complaints from parents about special needs education has risen by three-quarters in the past four years – with more than one complaint a day filed last year, according to figures from the local government and social care ombudsman (LGSCO). The increase reflects the crisis in the special educational needs and disabilities (Send) system, with rising demand, chronic underfunding, lengthy delays and enduring gaps in provision. Figures from the LGSCO – which looks at complaints about councils and adult care providers – show that 430 complaints were filed regarding Send education in 2021-22, up from 305 in each of the previous two years and 244 in 2018-19. A spokesperson for the LGSCO said: “We fully understand the massive difficulties faced by lots of families of children with special educational needs and disabilities. Most tell us it’s a constant battle just to secure the support to which they are entitled.”
According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a UN expert says that the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse (LGBT) people are being deliberately undermined by some state governments in the United States and has urged the Biden administration to strengthen measures to protect them. Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, said that LGBT persons, and particularly LGBT persons of colour, continue to face significant inequality in relation to health, education, employment and housing, as well as being disproportionately impacted by violence. The expert recognised that significant measures have been adopted by the Biden administration to address these challenges, but that they were under a concerted attack, “by deliberate actions to roll back the human rights of LGBT people at state level,” he said.