Teacher Sue-Belinda Meehan was on playground duty one summer afternoon in the late 1980s when a student picked up a bat in a fit of rage and broke her leg with it.
Mrs Meehan said she had been admonishing the boy for throwing a softball too hard and fast.
When she returned to school on crutches she insisted that the boy not be expelled, but instead be made to help her carry her books upstairs.
“He had been expelled from two previous schools and if he’d been expelled from mine he would have been doing home studies,” Mrs Meehan said.
A recent Senate committee report into worsening classroom behaviour found Australia had some of the world’s most disruptive classrooms, ranking 69 out of 76 countries in 2018.
The Senate inquiry heard on average Australian teachers spent 15 per cent of class time managing student behaviour instead of actually teaching.
The inquiry was launched about 12 months ago with a key focus on Australia’s declining spot in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) rankings for the “disciplinary climate” in schools, based on student reports.
The inquiry heard from teachers who had furniture thrown at them or had students punch through windows.
Mrs Meehan said the committee had a number of positive recommendations, such as returning to a traditional “explicit instruction” model instead of the “discovery learning” one.
Explicit instruction focuses on students learning from teachers, whereas discovery learning emphasises students teaching themselves.
Another recommendation Mrs Meehan backed was a return to traditional classrooms instead of open-plan models, which were dismissed as a “fad” by a NSW education committee.
A Queensland University of Technology submission to the committee found Australian teachers were teaching 838.28 classroom hours per year, compared to 516.98 in Korea.
The percentage of teachers who felt unsafe increased from 18.9 per cent to 24.5 per cent from 2019 to 2022.
“Student behaviour and violence was cited as one factor among many including parent abuse, negative relationships with staff and school leaders, and concerns related to COVID-19,” the report found.
The submission noted that disability was a “common denominator” for repeatedly suspended students, who were not having their needs met.
The report noted that teachers were not provided the time, support, or access to specialist colleagues to provide the required level of care for those students.
A 2021 survey from the Australian Education Union (AEU) found 89 per cent of public school principals were having to divert funds from other parts of school budgets because they did not have the resources to support students with disabilities.
(ABC)
