Announcing the legislation today, Deputy Premier and Minister for Education Ben Carroll said bolstering and simplifying the School Community Safety Order Scheme will make every school a safe place to learn and work, with consequences when those expectations are not met.

The scheme allows principals to ban parents, carers or other adults from school grounds and related places or from contacting school staff, but also makes it easier to act against harmful behaviour on social media, messaging and other online platforms.

The reforms recognise that abuse doesn’t stop at the school gate.

“We’re backing our teachers and school leaders with stronger powers to keep their communities safe,” Carroll said.

“Everyone deserves to feel safe at work and at school – and we have zero tolerance for abuse, including online.”

The changes follow an independent statutory review and targeted consultation with the school sector and community, where the feedback was clear – staff want stronger protections especially against online abuse.

The Australian Education Union’s Victorian Branch welcomed the bolster.

“Sadly, there are too many instances of physical and psychological harm against teachers, principals and education support staff perpetrated by some parents or carers and other members of school communities,” branch president Justin Mullaly said in a statement,

“This can take a huge toll on the health and wellbeing of school employees.”

Mullaly said everyone deserves to be safe at work and the public school workforce needed for the future cannot be retained if educators don’t have safe workplaces and safe work-related online spaces.

“While School Community Safety Orders are only one of a range of measures, they are an important way to keep public school staff safe when they need to be used,” he said.

ACU’s most recent Principal Health and Wellbeing Survey has found that almost half of school principals face physical violence in their jobs. Almost 90 per cent said they encounter offensive behaviour from students, parents and even colleagues.

Almost 54 per cent said they experienced threats of violence, with parents the main source of those threats, which have increased significantly since the survey started in 2011.

Principals identified parents as the primary source of cyberbullying, with roughly 88 per cent of principals dealing with this form of abuse.

A high percentages of leaders reported dealing with offensive behaviour, slander, and conflict instigated by parents.

In South Australia, recent legislative reforms allow public schools to issue formal banning notices – barring abusive parents from school grounds for up to six months.

The legislative change follows a dramatic rise in the number of incidents of parental abuse at schools, leading to a 200 per cent increase in parental bans in public schools over the past five years. 

In Queensland and NSW, comprehensive student behaviour strategies and formalised parental codes of conduct have been introduced to mandate respectful engagement with staff. 

Victoria’s reforms will also simplify how and when immediate orders can be issued, cutting red tape and making the scheme easier to use.

Immediate Orders can be issued orally or in writing by authorised staff when an adult presents an immediate, unacceptable risk of harm, disruption, or interference to the school community. These last for up to 14 days.

Ongoing Orders can last for up to 12 months and can restrict a person from entering or remaining on school-related grounds, approaching within 25 metres of staff members, contacting staff or communicating via school-controlled online platforms, for example, on social media pages.

Authorised persons can make an Ongoing Order if they reasonably believe the individual presents an unacceptable risk of, for example, causing physical or verbal harm to anyone on or near school grounds, significantly disrupting school activities, interfering with the safety, wellbeing, or education of students, behaving in a disorderly, offensive, or threatening way toward the school community or communicating unreasonably with or about a staff member.

Further changes will streamline the system making it more effective for principals while maintaining fairness for those subject to orders.

Introduced in 2022, the Scheme is said to be a last resort tool to manage the risk posed by a small minority of parents who engage in harmful, threatening or abusive behaviour.

The Government said the School Community Safety Orders will remain a last resort, used only when other options have failed or are not appropriate.