Dr TOYNE - 2001-02-28
Both the minister and his predecessor proposed a code of conduct as a solution to disruptive student behaviour in Territory schools. In a recent incident at Sanderson High School, two teachers were seriously assaulted when they tried to break up a brawl between students. In the same school, a class was menaced by a student threatening to bring a firearm to school to attack the teacher. In both these incidents, the school staff were left to deal with the trauma because there is no critical incident response unit in the Department of Education. The students causing these serious incidents can only be pushed out on to the streets to add to community crime because no alternative program exists.
How does your code of conduct help the teachers and students of Sanderson High School? Why isn’t there a critical response unit? What has happened to inclusion support funding for the schools? Is it true that this program has been abolished?
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, the answer to that is simple. If there are serious assaults or even minor assaults taking place in the schoolyard, and certainly if there is a threat of firearms, a critical response unit is called - the NT Police - and they are just down the road.
Dr Toyne: In that case, you don’t understand what a critical response unit is.
Mr LUGG: If you think for one moment that a piece of paper saying, ‘You must not do this’, will make any difference to the perpetrators, you are wrong. I have great faith that the principals in our schools will run this as they see fit. We offer that code of conduct as a guideline, but I do not believe for a second that people involved in these things do not know how to behave. They do. They just choose to ignore it, and there are sanctions in place for that. In cases like that, calling the NT Police is the obvious sanction.
How does your code of conduct help the teachers and students of Sanderson High School? Why isn’t there a critical response unit? What has happened to inclusion support funding for the schools? Is it true that this program has been abolished?
ANSWER
Mr Speaker, the answer to that is simple. If there are serious assaults or even minor assaults taking place in the schoolyard, and certainly if there is a threat of firearms, a critical response unit is called - the NT Police - and they are just down the road.
Dr Toyne: In that case, you don’t understand what a critical response unit is.
Mr LUGG: If you think for one moment that a piece of paper saying, ‘You must not do this’, will make any difference to the perpetrators, you are wrong. I have great faith that the principals in our schools will run this as they see fit. We offer that code of conduct as a guideline, but I do not believe for a second that people involved in these things do not know how to behave. They do. They just choose to ignore it, and there are sanctions in place for that. In cases like that, calling the NT Police is the obvious sanction.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016