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As I’ve written many times: when are we going to hold teachers and schools to account in the same way we have priests and churches? Priests have been vilified for over a decade, now, because of the horrendous crimes of a small minority and churches have been forced to pay enormous sums as compensation for allowing them to carry on their predation for years. Australia had an entire royal commission that hyper-focused on abuse by priests and enabling by tacitly complicit church hierarchies.
Where is the same treatment for schools? The royal commission barely touched on schools – at least, non-religious ones. Yet we know that abuse by teachers is at least as prevalent as by priests (one government investigation in the US concluded it is “likely 100 times worse”), and we also know that education bureaucracies were as complicit as church hierarchies in tacitly enabling it. So, where was the accountability?
At last, belatedly, some education bureaucrats are urging transparency. Yet, even now, the legacy media are doing their best to maintain the wall of silence.
Information about punishments handed to badly behaved school teachers could be become publicly available under a “reimagined” regulatory regime, the head of the education professional watchdog has suggested.
So, they’re finally being dragged, kicking and screaming, into a modicum of transparency and actually floating the idea that parents should be able to see more than just whether a teacher is registered. Chief executive Martin Fletcher wants a system closer to the medical register, where restrictions, conditions and disciplinary history are visible. He concedes the current setup is years behind what applies to doctors.
The numbers behind the polite language are ugly.
The institute had nearly 160,000 registered teachers and received about 1300 complaints or notifications about the behaviour of educators in the latest reporting period, the 2024–2025 financial year.
It referred two teachers to a hearing panel or prosecution that year, cancelled or suspended 27 teaching registrations and issued 71 warning letters.
That is not a handful of isolated incidents. That is a systemic problem the closed shop of the education industry, and its camp followers in the legacy media, have spent years pretending did not exist at scale.
A scale we can only begin to guess at, while the legacy media still cannot bring itself to call the behaviour what it is. One report speaks of “badly behaved school teachers” and “practitioner transparency” without ever spelling out that a large and rising share of the serious cases involve grooming behaviour via social media, messaging apps and online learning platforms.
Predatory teachers are increasingly using social media and electronic communication to groom children outside their classrooms as online learning becomes an everyday part of education.
Half the teachers currently suspended by Victoria’s teaching watchdog are facing allegations of online “grooming behaviour”, up from only one in eight such suspensions 2½ years ago.
The interim suspensions have been imposed by the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT) in cases where it is deemed a teacher poses an unacceptable risk to children, and include allegations of students with additional vulnerabilities being targeted, of adults seeking opportunities to meet children in person, and of encouraging students to keep conversations secret.
Fletcher insists teachers still enjoy “a high level of trust in the community” and that the push for transparency is about maintaining it rather than restoring it. Priests once enjoyed exactly the same deference. The difference is that churches were subjected to a full royal commission and years of relentless scrutiny. The education sector has largely escaped an equivalent examination. Non-religious schools were barely touched by the royal commission. The bureaucracies that run the system have shown the same institutional protectiveness once condemned in the churches.
Is the surge in electronic grooming cases simply old misconduct suddenly made visible by new technology, or an old misconduct turbocharged by new technology? Online platforms give teachers unprecedented private access to students at all hours – often when children are alone. They also leave a digital trail of evidence. Investigations have uncovered high volumes of communication across multiple platforms: overly personal comments, probing into students’ private lives and instructions to keep conversations secret. One Carey Grammar teacher had her registration cancelled for three years after admitting she contacted a student 35,000 times via Microsoft Teams before beginning a sexual relationship once the student turned 18.
The Victorian Institute of Teaching says it is keen to debate greater transparency but promises “no rush” and wide consultation first. It wants to balance the public right to know against the privacy rights of the individual. The teachers’ union did not even bother to respond to questions. Parents Victoria urges caution, warning that extensive disclosure risks “unintended consequences for teachers”. The same system that demands ever-greater intrusion into family life and parental rights suddenly discovers the virtues of privacy when its own members are under scrutiny.
This is why accountability has been so slow in coming. The education sector is a powerful, unionised and ideologically captured institution with a direct line to government and the favour of legacy media. It has spent decades building a culture of deference around itself while subjecting every other institution, especially religious ones, to forensic examination.
Parents are entitled to know whether the person teaching their children has a record of crossing professional boundaries. The current register hides conditions placed on registrations and offers only limited information on suspensions. That is not transparency: it is institutional self-protection dressed up as professional courtesy.
If the same standards applied to priests had been applied to teachers from the beginning, the numbers now emerging would not be treated as a surprise: they would be treated as evidence of long-term systemic failure. The wall of silence is finally cracking. It is long past time the education system faced the same level of scrutiny it has happily imposed on everyone else.
