Australia in grip of quiet, escalating crisis in education system

News.com.au

7 hours ago

Imagine this headline: '463 children protected from bullying in schools last month thanks to new safety measures.'
They're thriving. Their classrooms are calm. Their teachers feel safe.
But of course, you didn't read that headline — because when school systems work as they should, it doesn't make the news.
What we see instead is a steady stream of disturbing accounts from Australian classrooms and schoolyards.
Recent reports have revealed shocking abuse in early learning centres.
At the same time, violence, bullying, and serious disruption are rising across schools.
OECD data show that Australian students experience higher bullying exposure than the OECD average; none of the 24 comparison countries recorded more exposure.
About one quarter of 15-year-olds report being bullied at least a few times a month, and many say they no longer feel safe at school.
Discipline is also a concern. In PISA 2022, one quarter of Australian students said they could not work well in most or all lessons, and one third said students do not listen to the teacher.
Overall, Australia ranked well below the OECD average for disciplinary climate, with 20 of the comparison countries recording a more favourable classroom environment.
Teachers, too, are under growing threat. Safe Work Australia reports that serious workers' compensation claims for assault or occupational violence rose by 56% nationally between 2017–18 and 2021–22, with Education and Training one of the highest-risk industries.
In Victoria's government schools, recorded incidents of work-related violence from student behaviour toward staff increased more than fivefold in less than a decade — from 2,279 incidents in 2014–15 to 11,858 in 2023–24 (Victorian Auditor-General, 2025).
The national Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey (ACU, 2023) found that almost half of principals reported being physically attacked in the previous year — a rate that has risen by 78% since 2011.
Parents are also responding — withdrawing their children. Homeschooling rates are rising across Australia, often not out of ideology but as a last resort.
Education settings should be safe places for children and their teachers. Increasingly, they are not. Sadly, we are facing a simple, confronting truth: Australia is in the grip of a quiet but escalating crisis in school safety.
The silence around this is deafening.
Why are students who repeatedly bully, intimidate, or physically assault others allowed to remain in mainstream classrooms, placing peers and staff at ongoing risk?
Too often, the answer lies in the muddled thinking that confuses an ideological preference with an effective pedagogical intervention.
Schools are encouraged to prioritise inclusion, even when they lack the support to do so safely or effectively. Exclusion is discouraged, yet the resources needed for genuine intervention — therapeutic support, specialist settings, and follow-up — are scarce or inaccessible.
This doesn't just fail the victims. It fails the perpetrators, too. Keeping students with serious behavioural issues in settings that clearly aren't working, without expert help, only deepens their disengagement and risk.
We need more flexible, properly resourced options — including specialist settings, mobile intervention teams, and on-demand professional support that can be allocated where and when it's needed.
These aren't punishments. Done properly, they are acts of educational justice.
Failing to act does not protect these students from stigma. It denies them the tailored support they need to reset, re-engage, and grow. That's not inclusion. That's neglect.
Education departments and even federal education ministers often respond to rising disorder with calls for better teacher training — especially in behaviour management.
The implication is subtle but clear: that the problem lies not with policy or systems, but with individual teachers who just need to learn more strategies, manage classrooms more skilfully, or toughen up. It's an argument that's convenient, but unconvincing.
As a former head of teacher education programs at two Australian universities, I wonder how I may have better prepared a young female teacher so that she wasn't taunted by rape jokes or deepfake images of herself on social media.
The serious abuse incidents that are occurring in Australian schools and preschools are not fundamentally behaviour management problems.
They are systemic problems that stem from broader cultural, structural and social forces.
These subtle, cumulative changes have left many of our public institutions struggling to hold ground.
There has been, over time, a quiet erosion of respect for authority — not just for teachers or principals, but for parents, carers, nurses, the police and public institutions more broadly.
Boundaries that once offered clarity and safety are now frequently contested or ignored.
Expectations of mutual respect have been replaced, in some quarters, by demands for unconditional validation.
The norms of courtesy, patience, and collective responsibility — once seen as signs of maturity — are too often dismissed as weak or outdated.
If a teacher or principal has the temerity to caution or discipline a child, they may need to prepare for the possibility that the parent will confront and abuse them.
This is not confined to the usual suspects – the postcodes and demographics.
In the past couple of years, the prestigious private school, a short walk from where I am writing this, introduced a code of conduct - for parents!
Social media has supercharged many of these dynamics. Its platforms provide unlimited affordances for outrage, bullying, exclusion, and humiliation.
It's in this broader setting that schools are trying to function — and, more importantly, trying to teach.
They are being asked not just to deliver curriculum, but to help children build emotional regulation, social resilience, and an understanding of right and wrong.
We need public acknowledgement of the problem — not euphemisms like 'we have zero tolerance for this' - because, demonstrably, you don't.
We need transparency in incident reporting. We need investment in targeted interventions, wraparound services, and well-supported alternative programs.
We may need to look seriously at new and emerging technologies that could support more effective interventions, or alert schools to subtle changes in behaviour that may indicate a child has been bullied, abused, or is at risk of harming themselves or others.
We need to ensure that teachers and students are protected not just by policies, but in practice.
We also need to take a harder look at the legal and regulatory frameworks that govern how schools can respond to violence, intimidation, and abuse – by students and parents.
Too often, school leaders are left navigating grey zones — expected to contain serious behavioural risks without the tools or authority to act decisively.
They're caught between competing duties: to de-escalate crises, preserve inclusion, avoid liability, and protect the wellbeing of their staff and students — all at once. It's an impossible balancing act.
Somewhere, right now, a teacher is being assaulted in their own classroom. A student is sitting in fear because their bully has returned to school. A young child is attending a preschool where trust has already been broken. A teacher is submitting their letter of resignation.
And a parent is filling out paperwork to withdraw their child from a system that once promised safety and belonging.
None of this is inevitable. But we won't read about the children who were protected from bullying or the growing number of people attracted to teaching as a profession unless we act — with clarity, courage, imagination, and a renewed commitment to the core mission of schooling: to provide a safe place for children to learn, to grow, and to be.
- Geoff Riordan is an emeritus professor, a former school teacher, high school assistant principal and the former Dean of Education at the University of Canberra. In the mid-2000s, with Andrew Gonczi, he conducted major reviews of student welfare and discipline policy for the New South Wales Government, covering both public and non-government schools. He has held senior academic leadership roles and continues to advise on education practice, policy and student wellbeing.