Australian Catholic University has launched a PhD scholarship to address a growing number of safeguarding challenges, including a large increase in student-on-student abuse in schools nationwide.
The industry-funded scholarship is supported by MacKillop Family Services and will explore how schools can improve student safety through prevention and early identification.
Tim Moore, deputy director the Institute of Child Protection Studies, said that much of the safeguarding research completed to date focused on complying with new standards and systems, but there was a need to find ways to deal with emerging issues in a school setting.
“Schools are facing issues they haven’t encountered before,” Associate Professor Moore said.
“The rates of adult abuse of children in schools has decreased over time, but we’ve seen, for example, a large spike in the number of peer-to-peer issues. This covers a range of abuse, including violence in relationships or sexual harassment,” he said.
“Since the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, people have become more aware of some of the risks that organisations, particularly schools, need to manage.
“In light of the new technologies, we’re seeing a whole range of issues – kids are taking images of their classmates to create AI-generated pornography, for example. There are a whole lot of things confronting schools and keeping on the front foot is a key challenge.”
The successful candidate will be able to embed their research within an industry setting.
Nick Halfpenny, director of policy and research at MacKillop Family Services, said intervening early in a school setting was vitally important.
“Schools can’t afford to compartmentalise responsibility for child safety. They need to make sure that all staff are equipped to respond to a disclosure of an issue effectively,” Dr Halfpenny said.
Supervision of the PhD will be led by Associate Professor Moore, who said the opportunity is a unique blend of theory and practice, and offers a chance to create tangible change.
“They’ll be surrounded by practitioners, teachers, people who are living this day-to-day and they’ll get a better sense of whether or not teachers and schools can use these strategies,” he said.
“One of the exciting things is that our partnership with MacKillop Family Services means the student can start doing work from day one that will create real change.”
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