Transcript - Weekend Sunrise with David Woiwod & Monique Wright
DAVID WOIWOD: Well, any family of a child who has faced bullying knows the debilitating and sometimes catastrophic impact it can have. The Albanese Government has been under pressure to take action and overnight announced $10 million and a new national plan.
MONIQUE WRIGHT: Now, $5 million will go to a national awareness campaign, $5 million towards new resources for teachers, students and parents, educating them on how to deal with bullying and how to be a – quote – "upstander". And the Federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, joins us now.
Hello, Jason. Good to see you. Ok, let's unpack this a little bit so we can understand it better. Under this plan, schools should respond within two days. So, what keeps them to that timeline and what sort of response are you talking about?
JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Well, what parents told us. We commissioned a big review here and talked to parents about what's working and what's not. And mums and dads told us that often it takes just too long for the school to act and that the earlier we act, the more chance we've got of nipping this in the bud and stopping the bullying from happening.
I think this is something that every mum and dad worries about. I know I do. And the terrible truth is it's getting worse, not better. The internet is a big part of that. It's not just push and shove in the playground today. Bullying can follow you all the way home and you can get bullied day or night, and anyone can see it. It's worse than that. AI is supercharging this problem. We heard stories yesterday from the eSafety Commissioner, not about children bullying other children, but AI chatbots, artificial intelligence, bullying other children, telling them they're losers, telling them to kill themselves. We heard stories about children overseas killing themselves because artificial intelligence told them to. So, that's how terrifying this is. And what parents have told us is we think action needs to be faster within the first two days for action to be taken by the school to get to the bottom of what's happening, to take action to stop it. And that involves not just talking to the children at the school, but also talking to the mums and dads, to the parents of the victim of the bullying and the parents of the child that's doing the bullying. And the sooner we act, the better. But what teachers told us is they need help too. There's a lot of great programs out there that are being run by some schools. We're going to put them all online so all schools know where to go to get best practice, but also to develop some more tools for teachers, and, in addition to that, some tools for parents – because if you're the mum and dad who gets a phone call and you're told your child's been a victim of bullying, or if you're a mum and dad who's told your child's the bully, they're telling us we need to know what to do next.
WOIWOD: Minister, yes, so this timeline has now been sped up just a couple of days, as you point out. But that doesn't mean that the bullying will actually stop. So, what in this $10 million will actually get us there?
CLARE: Yeah. And mate, I'm not naive about this. There's always been bullies, there'll always be bullying. And as I just said, a lot of this is now happening not in the playground, it's happening online. But schools are places where we can take action to try and address this. And so what we've said is this is the standard, two days. The sooner you act, the better. And Ministers agreed yesterday that we need to develop an implementation plan that will kick off in February about how we implement this. Part of it is that two-day rule, part of it is bringing all of the best programs together in one place. But we also agreed yesterday that this needs to be part of teachers’ professional development; those pupil-free days where teachers sit down and work together to get ready for school. And in addition to that, that we should make it part of the course at university. So, when someone's training to be a teacher, in addition to the changes we're making to help them teach children to read and to write and to manage disruptive classrooms, that we also give them better tools when they're training about how to deal with bullying and other harmful behaviours at school.
WRIGHT: Absolutely. And trauma response training is very specialised. But Jason, I've got five teachers in my family, they are pushed as it is. So, anyone that knows a teacher knows that there's already so much pressure on them. It sounds like we're loading it up more. 10 million bucks, 5 million for an awareness campaign and 5 million to have online resources. It's great. But how are you going to ease the pressure for them in the classroom to enable them? Are they going to be more student-free days? How do you physically do this and educate them?
CLARE: Yeah, and believe me, this is not about trying to load up or add work to teachers because they're already overloaded. The truth is bullying's already happening. We know it's there. It's affecting kids at school. It means not just the mental health challenges that some children are facing, but it also means children are falling behind because they're affected by this at school, or that some children aren't at school at all. The better we tackle it the easier we are going to make it for teachers to do what they came to school to do which is to teach children. So those resources we think will help, but there's a lot of other things we need to do to reduce workload for teachers. One of the other things we discussed yesterday are the changes we need to make to the curriculum. We agreed yesterday to look at the maths curriculum for the first three years at school to make it simpler and to provide more materials, more support for teachers to make sure that they have the help they need to teach maths in the right order so kids learn the basics when they're really little, that's just another example of the work we're doing to try and help our teachers.
WRIGHT: And also teaching kids to be upstanders and not to walk past the behaviour. Jason Clare, thank you very much.
WOIWOD: Thanks, Minister.
CLARE: No worries, thank you.