Public meeting in Bairnsdale, 11 November 1999 - notes
School Focused Youth Service Co-ordinator
Part of the Victorian government's Youth Suicide Strategy aiming to ensure that community services reach young people at risk. The project commenced with 40 officers across the State - $50,000 per year in each region - in October 1998. Unmet needs in East Gippsland are
- Gippsland Child
and Adolescent Mental Health Service is severely understaffed resulting
in a waiting list of 5 or 6 weeks for non-emergency services. The Service
has 3 staff and assesses it needs another 1 staff member.
- There is no adolescent
psychiatrist within 2 hours drive although the funding is available
to employ one. There are 2 beds for adolescent psychiatry in the Gippsland
region so that adolescents are often accommodated with adults. A part-time
psychologist visits from Melbourne.
- Centre Against
Sexual Assault has only one worker for adolescents spending only 0.2
of her time in the area east of Sale resulting in several months waiting
time for all but emergency cases of adolescent sexual assault. The police
offer the only after-hours service.
- No special education
service exists outside the school system for young people with intellectual
disabilities. The special school is at Sale. There is no facility for
overnight stay so it's a daily commute. A lot of children from Lake
Tyers and Lakes Entrance commute to Sale on a daily basis.
- Funding for integration
aides for students with disabilities is extremely difficult to access,
particularly for psychological disabilities.
- Low numbers of child protection staff in light of the area to be covered and the high incidence of reporting resulting in long delays in responding and lack of follow-up. Low priority is given to verbal and emotional abuse allegations. There is also a high turnover staff and a high proportion of new graduates.
Integration Aides
A primary school principal reported difficulty getting children assessed for integration because of the limited services available through the Education Department. Assessment workers cover from Bairnsdale through to the border (with NSW). Their job is not only to assess children for integration funding but also to counsel children at risk. However, most of their time is devoted to assessment. There was also concern about the inflexibility of the assessment procedure: for example, a recommendation was not funded because it arrived a day late (even though posted on the same day as another recommendation which did arrive and was funded). Fortunately an alternative source of funding was located for this student - but the school's own budget had to be used to supplement support for him.
"You more or less can't get funding for children with extreme emotional problems - unless they're about to kill someone or have done it. By the time you get them assessed and get their parents to understand there's a problem, they've got to get to Bairnsdale to the child mental health unit . It can take 12 months to get a child assessed for emotional funding. What happens to them in the meantime? What happens to the school and their peers in the classroom? This impacts especially on a small school where there are not a lot of adults in the school to take the load."
"For a severe language disorder child you get 0.3 of a teacher aide - which is approximately $8,000 a year to run their program. That's all right to help them with their language work but if they've got problems with social skills and things like that and you need to get them out of the classroom it's not going to cover that. Someone has to find the money for that. Often it's the school. If they are Koorie we can sometimes access money through DETYA. But for ongoing problems it's very hard to get funding."
Concern was also expressed about failure to pick up severe language disorders; students are not identified until their behaviour breaks down in the secondary system. At least part of the reason is that this disorder has only recently been recognised and there are few people trained to assess for it. "They say there's about 20% who could have severe language disorders. So we're only looking at the tip of the iceberg."
"In the Catholic system our funding comes just from the Commonwealth. We don't get any State funding at all. Just one child at the secondary college might be getting $24,000 for the year. Our total budget for all the children - about 8 or so on the books a couple of years ago - was $24,000. We had two girls who were quadriplegics who couldn't toilet or feed themselves. Now one's in Year 12 just finishing her exams and one's in Year 11. We got them through by using parental help. So we do advise some parents that their kids are going to be better off at the secondary college where they can access State funding. They're not really free to choose the schooling they want; where maybe other siblings have gone."
Students with disabilities
"My son is profoundly deaf. The language he understands is Auslan. He can't hear anything and has no speech. I can't praise his school highly enough for what they're doing for him. But the end result is that at the moment a very intelligent Grade 2 child is being educated by people whose language level would be that of a 2 or 3 year old. Because their signing skills just aren't there. The integration money is only enough to pay integration aide wages. To get people who have high level language skills you need to offer interpreter wages. But they just won't allow that. He's given the highest level of funding on the disabilities/impairments program. He also has cerebral palsy which is why he gets the highest level. His physical needs are great as well as his linguistic and educational needs. It's not his fault. He still has the right to the education that the other kids do. But I have to say that a lot of his education is provided at home.
"His physical needs are a priority for the school. The integration aides are well trained for that. The same people, though, are expected to be his educators. That would be a rare combination with the result that he's getting only a very basic communication that he's way past years ago."
Counselling services
In Orbost this year 3 parents and one secondary student have died. "We had to call on counselling for the kids. We used every person we could possibly drag in. Everyone was really willing to come. But it took so much time to organise. We set up the counselling in our school for the kids. But we ended up with parents needing it and neighbours. We were a full-on counselling site for the whole community. The parents had nowhere else to go - we had all the counsellors. We also found that teachers and integration aides had to counsel the parents when the counsellors were occupied. They couldn't get on and do their jobs until they dealt with the crisis. It's when a crisis occurs that we really notice when we're under-resourced. We get that done but there's no follow-up because the services go somewhere else to do their emergency work."
"Within an hour's drive of Cann River there is not one qualified counsellor."
Student Services based at Bairnsdale Secondary College: 3 psychologists/ probationary psychs and 2 speech pathologists: more are needed, they are difficult to attract and difficult to retain. Usually only one year contracts are offered. Regional disability assessment and counselling staff have to travel very large distances between schools where they are required to provide support to students. "Getting to students who have intensive needs is a real issue for us." Tubbut, on the border, is the most remote primary school in Victoria. "It's not serviced during the winter months - you wouldn't drive up there in winter." "In small towns it is difficult for students to access counselling and this is compounded by their concerns about confidentiality."
"Support services in the community are not there. You can wait 6 weeks for an appointment with a psychiatrist. The nearest pediatrician to Bairnsdale is in Sale. Lifeline has had drastic funding cuts. We have youth homelessness, alcoholism, gambling addiction, domestic violence. Half of our students' families are on the education maintenance allowance. There's a multiplicity of problems but way, way below the staffing levels in support systems to cope with them."
Koorie students
"We find that children often have to share the teachers aide time that's been allocated to them with other children. So that child doesn't get what they're entitled to. It's quite a few children. They've been assessed as needing an aide, including children who take epileptic seizures. They don't get enough one-on-one time even though it's been allocated to them. Our kids continue to be disadvantaged."
"Some of our students have been asked to leave and not come back until next year. And they're in Year 7 and Year 8. But I'm appalled with a lot of Koorie parents. They need their fathers' direction and they're not getting it. We need some parenting courses. They're taking their hands of their responsibilities and then the kids' behaviour puts them in the court system. And they turn up to court on their own. Our Koorie community really needs support within itself as well."
Teacher recruitment
"We're looking at a teacher shortage of fairly high proportions within a couple of years. Already we're finding it difficult to attract graduates. In our situation, because we've got falling student numbers, we really have to wait until census time in February to work out how many teachers we can afford to have on our staff. You're really left with those who are willing to come or making do with people who prefer to do casual relief teaching - bullying them to come and teach for the year. Once teachers get into a small school they don't have security of employment, often, because of the contract system. They could be really fantastic but you can't guarantee them employment for the following year. So they're going to apply for everything at the end of the year before and leave."
The meeting was told that the typical teaching contract is for one year with some for only 6 months or even less. One secondary teacher who has been qualified for 5 years is on her 20th contract. "That doesn't engender any commitment in young teachers to schools." Schools avoid paying staff during Xmas holidays, too, by employing them from February to December only and then re-hiring them the following February.
"Teachers are employed for a period of time. They respond to individual school advertisements. Often at the end of a year you might advertise for someone for Term 1 only because you don't know how your numbers will line up for the year. It's very hard to attract someone from Melbourne to Orbost or Mallacoota for three months knowing there may not be a job at the end. If a teacher works in the school for two years in a row and get a contract for the following year, they can then become ongoing. They can teach at schools at 10 years nearly around the area and still be contract teachers. They get their increments, but it's a career thing."
"The other problem we have is that we get first year out teachers applying for jobs and we might have half a dozen applying - but when we come to interview they won't turn up because they've already got jobs in Melbourne. They don't want to come. We're just too far away."
"Since contracting came in and since the budgeting came in where schools could choose to appoint more teachers at lesser pay, remote areas like Swifts Creek are definitely disadvantaged. What tends to happen, especially in the secondary school, is that a young teacher will be there a year and after that is gone and there's a changeover. It doesn't offer much socially for young teachers anyway. In the past it was a step up for a family man who would come in with a young family in his mid-20s and would stay in the district for at least 3 years. There would be a house provided and the family would become part of the district."
"We had a teacher who was a very good teacher of German and she had to reapply for her job every year, hoping there'd be money for it. Eventually she said "I want to get on with my life. I can't buy a house or a car." And we lost her."
"In the past there was a statewide transfer system so surplus teachers could move on. That no longer exists. Schools are on a global budget and directly employ their staff. They can't go over their staffing budget. So they keep 25-30% of their staff on contracts so that they can shift them off depending on student numbers and changes in curriculum needs."
There are no incentives to attract teachers to rural schools. "The schools might have the discretion to offer incentives but they really can't because their budgets are so stretched."
Professional development
"We do get some rurality funding - which does make a difference - if you're of a certain size. It's State funding. But we get the same amount per teacher for professional development as someone in the city. So from that PD bucket we not only have to pay for their registration, we have to pay for travel to get there, usually accommodation. So it automatically reduces the opportunities for teachers to be developed in the area of their profession. It also limits what they can then offer in the classroom and that's a disadvantage for the children. Rurality funding might provide an extra teacher or a bus to take the children on excursions. But it doesn't address that problem of bringing the best quality into the classroom."
"An absolutely typical example. I do a lot of counselling and I wanted to attend a course on suicide counselling. But it was on a Wednesday afternoon from 4-6pm in Melbourne over 4 weeks. It takes me 4 hours to get to Melbourne."
"I was asked to bring 4 people to a state-wide meeting in Melbourne next week - a 9-5 meeting - and no accommodation was being offered because "It's only a one-day thing". I'd have to get up at 4am to get there and one of the people I was going to bring lives even further away and would have to get up at 3am."
Travel vs distance education
"I'm very concerned about children in rural areas being bussed to primary school and secondary school. The children around Wairewa spend almost 3 hours a day on the bus. The school is 25 minutes away by car but the bus goes all around. Three hours is actually the criteria for some benefits. They travel just a few minutes under. I've seen the effects on the children over the years: tiredness, lack of motivation and other impacts. A viable alternative is correspondence school. But it's not promoted by principals and a lot of parents are afraid to take it on. I think there's also a lack of funds for correspondence. It seems the budget has continually been cut."
A participant whose family lived 100km outside Bairnsdale for several years described her daughter's education experience during that period. She spent half an hour each way, each day on the bus to primary school. (Her younger brother was travelling the same distance each day to kindergarten.) "But when she went to secondary school our only options were to board her in Bairnsdale with strangers or for her to do correspondence. We chose the latter. The quality of the education they provided at that time was wonderful. They did have a library, good communication with the student and good support. (I have heard, though, that their budget has been severely cut since and that that personal communication that they had with the students has gone.) However, my daughter found she was very isolated from her social group and she got very depressed about half way through Year 8. That's when we moved into Bairnsdale. We moved away again later and she boarded in Years 9 and 10. But she was missing the family support. After that we ran two homes so that she could live at home for her senior years. That put a lot of strain on the family finances. Rural families who are strongly motivated to educate their children put an enormous effort into that. There's not a great deal of support for those families."
"Children under 9 who live 5 km from the nearest bus stop are entitled to distance education but when they turn 9 they have to go to school unless they live 10 km away. That seems a bit crazy to me."
"At the age of 9 they have to completely change their way of life. What's really important isn't the distance, it's the time they spend travelling."
Cultural exposure
"Lack of exposure and access to cultural experiences could impact on the school. It could limit their vision and their ability to make choices during their education and when they leave school. I think this is a major difference between students from the city and the country. Our current resources don't allow us to take children down to Melbourne nearly as much as was happening 10 years ago. We encourage our students to move away from the area either to do further study or for jobs. But a lot of them are staying on in the town, not risking going out, and they're unemployed. There's huge unemployment here and a big drug problem. I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that the young people get trapped here.
"Occasionally now the students go down to Melbourne for a day - say for a football game. But 10 years ago we had a program where the Year 10s went down for 3 days. That got knocked on the head. There's no official program for the students to go down to Melbourne."
"Kids whose families don't have relatives in Melbourne have often not been to Melbourne even by the age of 14 or 15. They're very frightened of the city - their parents are too. They don't know how to get around in the city."
Income support for tertiary education
"Our assets just put us right on the limit (for Youth Allowance) so that we are unable to get any assistance for our daughter's tertiary education in Melbourne. Several years ago - when it was still Austudy - and we were a declared drought area, Centrelink was initially unaware of their own regulation that in drought conditions certain parts of the assets test would be overlooked. That enabled us to get Austudy for a short period of time. With the change to Youth Allowance we've found that that allowance for drought-affected areas has been deleted. Both of us have to find off-farm work now to support our daughter at Uni."
"Last year our daughter got a federal scholarship which paid her HECS fees but this year the government has dropped that. It's ironic because she is studying occupational therapy - just the kind of qualification that country areas are crying out for. And our next daughter plans to study nursing. They will both come back to country hospitals but they're not getting any support to do that study. And other country kids won't be able to afford to do those kinds of studies."
"You have to pay for your student concession cards now - $125."
"A study by Melbourne Uni found that it costs about $8,000 a year to keep a student at home going to University and something like $15,000 for a student sharing a flat. That's probably a bit on the high side but an increasing number of students say they will apply to go to Uni but they'll defer. They hope to work and save some money to put themselves through or help their family out. There's not enough income support for rural kids doing tertiary study. Scholarships are increasingly going to kids from private schools who get the highest scores. Increasingly I hear young students considering tertiary study by distance education. That's very difficult for young people and it takes away from the social experience of going to University."
"I've done Year 12 this year and I've seen a lot of people at my year level nearly destroying their attempts to complete Year 12 because of their part-time jobs. They've been too busy trying to make money to go to University to finish their work requirements or study for exams."
Tertiary education
"Monash Gippsland was established as a college of advanced education in the 1960s. Since Monash has taken over the campus, it increasingly treats it as another metropolitan campus. The 7 different faculties on campus see their role as promoting their own, individual, interests. In the last 3 years Universities have suffered funding cuts of 25%. It was easier to implement the cuts in faculties in regional universities rather than right across the board. That disadvantages regional students. The whole ethos of a huge metropolitan university is to maintain standards, to raise TER scores, which means that tertiary students who can't afford to go to Melbourne miss out altogether. We have asked Dr Kemp whether the government has a policy about regional campuses and were told that there was no such policy and that it's up to each university as to how they treat their regional campuses. Monash has now appointed a working party to look into the directions in which its only regional campus is heading. The only concession the University makes to regional students is to offer bridging courses on the Gippsland campus to help them to cope with University studies."
"Mature age students - those who survive the distance education process - do extremely well. But school leavers don't do very well at all. They don't cope very well."
"Our son is studying at University in Sydney. He's in his third year. We've just found out that he's not been doing too well. The main reason is his disconnection and dislocation from the family. He's admitted home-sickness is his main problem. Being such a long distance away we see him only at session break if he can afford to come home and at Xmas if he can afford to come home. That depends on his part-time job as well. And we can very rarely ever get up there to see him. Accommodation is incredibly expensive up there. Distance is a very big disadvantage to tertiary students. One minute they're at school and the next minute they're gone."
"It's not just the new study. It's the whole thing - new friends, loss of family, lack of transport. It's really tough. They get so lonely."
Race relations
"We have a very big problem here with Indigenous-white Australian relations. We have a large Indigenous population in this area. Some give the rest a bad name. So we just say 'blackfella - hate him'."
"Many students feel the Koories get so much advantage that they [the white students] are being discriminated against. They feel that the Koorie students get away with things they wouldn't."
"I don't think you'd see a black kid in a job in this town. Previously they might have been employed in the timber industry or on the railways."
One Koorie Educator reported having been turned away from the primary school at 8 years of age. "I must have been considered a real terrorist. The climate is much the same today. We want to see our Koorie people in offices and supermarkets and shops in this town."
The father of a Philippino child confirmed that at the State school he was the victim of racist abuse. At the private school where he is now there is very strict discipline and racist comments are not tolerated.
"Our community is very lacking in cultural diversity and the whole community is very intolerant. We try to redress that by providing the widest education we can at the secondary college. We have policies to try to address racism but you can't catch every incident. We know Koories can't get jobs in the town. We have a work experience program for Koorie students to get them out into the community. It's really hard because a lot of them don't have the confidence to do that. Every time someone does it it's a model for other kids to follow them."
"At the secondary college the issue of racism has only become an issue in the last few years because Koorie students are tending to stay longer at school and have a greater presence. Previously they'd leave halfway through Year 7 or by Year 8. There would be only half a dozen Koorie students in the school whereas now there are 60-70. Similarly in the community, if Koorie people are pushed to the margins and not present in the town, racism doesn't come up."
"On a positive note, the Aboriginal Tutorial Assistance Scheme is really working. Students who have even been assessed as disabled, with one-on-one tutorials they come up to the average level for their age group whereas previously they could have been several years behind." There was some criticism, however, of the fact that ATAS funding can only be used before or after school or in free study periods for VCE students.
Last updated 2 December 2001.
