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Education Minister Sue Ellery forced to apologise in Parliament over Halls Creek school attendance debacle

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Bethany HiattThe West Australian
Education Minister Sue Ellery has been forced to apologise to Parliament.
Camera IconEducation Minister Sue Ellery has been forced to apologise to Parliament. Credit: Andrew Ritchie/The West Australian

Education Minister Sue Ellery has been forced to apologise in Parliament over the Education Department’s bungled attempt to crack down on truancy in the Kimberley town of Halls Creek after an investigation found “serious shortfalls”.

The department had promised to closely monitor students’ attendance at Halls Creek District High School after a 2019 Coroner’s inquest into child suicides in the Kimberley found truancy was one of the factors in the deaths.

In 2020 it claimed significant improvements in attendance at Halls Creek, but this was later revealed to be a mistake.

The West Australian understands more than 200 attendance plans were prepared for individual Halls Creek students in 2020, but many were incomplete, with sections left blank, and were not seen or signed by families.

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In a statement to Parliament, Ms Ellery on Thursday said the State Ombudsman had conducted a review into the suspected suicides of two Halls Creek students in 2017 and 2018.

In response to the 2017 death, the Ombudsman recommended the Education Department confirm that all students identified as being at severe attendance risk had documented attendance plans in place by the end of semester 1, 2020.

After a journalist put detailed allegations about the standard of the plans developed for Halls Creek students to Ms Ellery’s office in June this year, she ordered the department to investigate further.

“These allegations raised serious concerns for me, particularly in light of the vulnerability of some of the students involved,” she said.

“The inquiry found serious shortfalls in the planning, implementation and oversight of the development of attendance plans for those Halls Creek students identified as at severe attendance risk.”

Premier Mark McGowan and Education and Training Minister Sue Ellery today officially launched the McGowan Government’s new career taster portal, visiting North Metropolitan TAFE’s East Perth campus to see the Year 9 Career Taster Program in action.
Camera IconEducation Minister Sue Ellery has been forced to apologise to Parliament over the Education Department’s bungled attempts to crack down on truancy in the Kimberley town of Halls Creek. Credit: Ian Munro/The West Australian

The damning report from the department’s investigation found there were “multiple points of failure” in creating attendance plans for at-risk students and that parental sign-off on all plans was “not achieved”.

“Further, given that as few as 50 per cent of families were understood to have returned to Halls Creek at the beginning of Term 3, 2020, it is difficult to reconcile the number of plans claimed to have been prepared,” it said.

The report noted that inadequate levels of planning or record keeping had rendered the Kimberley education regional office “vulnerable to judgements of mismanagement”.

Ms Ellery apologised to the family of the Halls Creek student whose death triggered the Ombudsman’s review.

“That death should have served to respectfully improve student engagement — the report I table today shows that it did not,” she said.

“It is now clear that the work in response to the Ombudsman’s recommendation was not done to the scale, or with the follow-up necessary, to make a difference to students’ engagement with school, and the opportunity to honour that loss of life was wasted.”

Ms Ellery also apologised to Parliament over her referral to the attendance strategy in response to a question in 2020, where she said the school had created a case-management approach to identify reasons why kids were not attending school and was working with families to get them to attend.

“It is now clear that approach was not for the whole cohort, and neither was it over a sustained period of time,” she said.

Ms Ellery said she had previously raised questions with the department about the strategy, including last year when similar allegations were made by an anonymous source.

“I have expressed my disappointment to the Director-General but I also accept I could have pushed harder earlier,” she said.

Education Director-General Lisa Rodgers admitted the department had not initially provided Ms Ellery with accurate information on Halls Creek attendance, but said she did not believe there was any intention by staff to deliberately mislead her office or the Minister.

She said she had “reflected deeply” on the matter, and took full responsibility.

“It did not meet my expectations or those of the community we serve,” she said. “Regardless of the challenges of COVID-19 in 2020, more should have been done to work with families in overcoming barriers to getting children and young people to school.”

Liberal MP for the mining and pastoral region Neil Thomson said an apology should also be made to school participation officer Brock Burston, who faced a trial in Kununurra Magistrate’s Court last year for leaking Halls Creek attendance data.

Although he was acquitted he has been suspended for the past eight months, under threat of disciplinary action by the department.

“If it wasn’t for him speaking out to the Shire, then none of this would have come to the fore,” Mr Thomson said. “His life has been turned upside down for 16 months.”

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