Delay in plan to stem school student suicide clusters
State schools will not have a proper plan in place to prevent suicide clusters until at least mid-2021, as the Department of Education has delayed its review.
NSW
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Vulnerable students are falling through the cracks because state schools do not have a proper review process to prevent suicide clusters.
Sixteen months ago the Department of Education was told it should establish a process of review after a 2017 parliamentary inquiry into youth suicide.
The NSW Ombudsman’s Child Death Review Team made this recommendation because the department “does not currently have a process to undertake a systems review of suicide deaths of students”.
“Learning from missed opportunities and using their understanding to frame future practices and policy is critical to inform work with vulnerable young people,” the report said.
But despite the recommendation being made in June 2019, the department won’t make a decision until at least the middle of 2021 following a review by youth mental health experts Orygen and Everymind.
There were 96 suicides of children aged 5-17 in Australia in 2019, according to ABS figures released last week.
This is 10 more deaths than in 2015 but five less than 2018.
NSW Opposition education spokeswoman Prue Car said Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Education Minister Sarah Mitchell “have tried to downplay the mental health crisis gripping our state’s schools”.
“Now we know they have failed to act on their own mistakes,” Ms Car said.
“The Liberals’ refusal to act is failing NSW families. But don’t hold your breath for action — under this government it will just get swept under the rug.”
The suicide cluster review includes a look at staff training, mapping suicide hot spots and how best to deal with external stakeholders.
The report also revealed a significant gap between the post-suicide response of state schools and the Catholic and independent schools.
While it was found that Catholic and independent schools had satisfied their post-suicide recommendations, the state system can’t be evaluated until the review is finished.
It also found while the state has good systems of identifying suicidal teens, “intervention once a problem is identified can be episodic and fragmented”.
The Sunday Telegraph’s Can We Talk campaign is calling for mandatory mental health first aid training for all NSW teachers.
We are also calling on the government to increase the number of school counsellors to one for every 500 students — a rate recommended by the NSW Coroner, NSW Teachers Federation, the state’s P&C Federation and health experts.
A department spokesman said: “NSW public schools have some of the best suicide support programs in the country, and the department often provides support to independent and Catholic sector schools”.
“Public schools are leading the state in their suicide response practices and continue to improve them, currently through a partnership with Orygen,” he said.
“Orygen is a leading researcher in the field of suicide postvention. The work will support an evaluation of postvention initiatives, including the effectiveness of initiatives preventing suicide clusters in NSW government high schools.”
The spokesman said the current postvention resource has been developed in collaboration with headspace and NSW Health and is well aligned with evidenced-based postvention best practice.
“The Ombudsman’s report highlights this resource as a good example of existing initiatives that support the mental health and wellbeing of school students,” he said.