For decades, Victoria's education department shuffled paedophile teachers to new schools where they abused more schoolchildren. As the historical scale of the scourge in the Victorian public system becomes clearer, there are calls for the state to confront the issue with a broader inquiry.
Little is known of Reynolds's likely sexual offending between 1960 and 1969 — a period in which he taught in the Ballarat region at Vile Vile North, Carranballac and Ballarat North, and spent a year teaching in New Zealand — but from that point, courts have heard, there is extensive documentation of not only his crimes, but the negligent dithering of the Victorian Education Department administrators who were aware of them.
What those communications revealed was a system that prioritised and protected a paedophile teacher, shuffled Reynolds around to new schools whenever his position became untenable and placed incalculable numbers of children at risk of the lifelong damage caused by his assaults. Between 1981 and 1992, at the Kiewa Valley, Dederang, Myrtleford, Yackandandah and Beechworth primary schools, Vincent Reynolds not only resumed his sexual abuse of boys with almost reckless abandon, but started assaulting girls too.
"Many things wouldn't have occurred if the Education Department had done something about you," Cannon said, quoting from Reynolds's police interviews before pointing to "catastrophic failures which saw [Reynolds] being able to continue to teach and to offend".Of the department's decision to send Reynolds back into the classroom in 1980, Cannon said: "You supposed that you were pleased to go back to work and there wasn't going to be a fuss made.
Not the first or last to do so, Wilson suggested a conspiracy not unlike the Catholic Church's efforts to shuffle abusive priests from parish to parish. Half a century later, as the depth and scale of the problem has become clearer, they are increasingly interested. "At first I couldn't believe how common it was," says John Rule, who leads the abuse team at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers and has represented dozens of plaintiffs who've sued the Victorian Education Department in historical childhood sexual abuse matters.
Indeed, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse did not examine a single case study specific to Victorian Education Department schools. Neither did the Victorian government's own Betrayal of Trust inquiry of 2013, which probed only religious and non-government institutions.
In a statement, the Victorian Education Department said it was "not aware of a deliberate cover-up of paedophilic behaviour but acknowledges and deeply regrets any instances where this may have occurred".The process of unravelling the Victorian Education Department's decades-long indulgence of paedophile teachers in the post-war years is made difficult by several factors.
Individual teacher files frequently obtained by lawyers offer basic chronologies, listing the schools to which a teacher was assigned and, sometimes, the date on which their papers were marked "never to be re-employed". But the Victorian Education Department does not otherwise enjoy a stellar reputation for the provision of useful documents, a situation not helped by its haphazard record-keeping procedures in the peak years of the abuse scourge.
Morris, who was jailed for six years in 2016 for abusing boys as young as six years old, taught at seven government primary schools in country western Victoria, the Yarra Valley and Melbourne's outer-eastern suburbs between 1966 and 1980 and was the subject of parental complaints to the Victorian Education Department as early as 1967.
Inevitably, Morris offended again. Surprisingly, a second criminal investigation in 1980 finally led to the conviction that banished him from the Victorian Education Department's teaching ranks. Morris later relocated to Canberra, somehow managing to acquire a job teaching international students in the 2000s.
"The Education Department shuffled a paedophile from school to school for years, effectively supplying a child abuser with new victims year after year,"Lawyer Michael Magazanik successfully took action on behalf of survivors who were abused by Robert Morris and Vincent Reynolds. On account of the department's relatively flat organisational structure, any principal who received a student or parent's complaint could expect to receive timely advice from the highest levels of the department.
The director-general of the Education Department bore ultimate responsibility for teacher discipline. DIs were responsible for ensuring not just the quality of education, facilities and teaching standards in Victorian schools, but for the practical enforcement of teacher discipline. In 1982, Ron Ikin, then the president of the Association of Inspectors of Primary Schools, explained his job to The Age:
If there was a written policy for this scenario, it is now exceedingly difficult to find. But a good hint can be found in an oral history of Victorian school inspectors compiled in 2012 by university academic Norma Gray. In it, Harry Dawson, a former Victorian primary school district school inspector, outlined the policy as he saw it:
But Frances Brown's teaching career now stands as an unfortunate exemplar of something sinister and disgraceful. It illustrates the abject failure of the district school inspector system to weed out sexually abusive teachers. Following her graduation, Brown had been working as a teacher's aide at Nambrok West Primary, another small rural school, when the department's offer arrived of a full-time position at Bairnsdale West Primary.By then, enrolment numbers at Nambrok West Primary had increased sufficiently that its overworked principal and sole teacher, Michael Gossage, convinced Brown to stay on and join him full-time.
She was the kind who still refers to those children as "my little ones" and says, "the 10 of us were like a little family down there in that little room". "But we were in the middle of a locality of dairy farms and the parents were so excited that their kids were going to learn musical instruments that they didn't question those sorts of things."
By the end of her second year at Nambrok West Primary, Frances Brown recalls she was wracked by the "overwhelming sense that I had to protect my little ones", so did what her teacher training had taught her to do and resolved to share her concerns with the Victorian Education Department's district school inspector for the Traralgon region.
Brown says she shared her concerns. Ikin listened. Then he offered a response that Brown has never been able to accept in the ensuing 40 years: a dismissive explanation that Gossage had already been shifted from Sarsfield Primary, and a suggestion that Brown might prefer to move to another school."I was in absolute turmoil about it," she says. "And the response I got was, 'We've already shifted him from somewhere else, so we'll shift you.' That's all he said.
The first was no less awful for its predictability: shuffled by the department into further teaching and principal roles at Weerite Primary, Hampton Park East Primary and Longwarry Primary, Michael Gossage continued to sexually abuse his pupils for almost a decade after Brown's complaint, finally being jailed in 1991.
Frances Brown moved into specialised early intervention work with children with additional needs and challenging behaviours. Such distant political squabbles might seem unimportant now, but it is in the documentary relics of such obscure outfits as the VSTA that the Victorian Education Department's haphazard system of sexual abuse cover-ups can become visible.
The outcome categories include: "reprimanded", "fined", "fined and reduced in classification", "found guilty but no penalty", "charges withdrawn", "hearing pending", and "member dismissed". At Public Record Office Victoria , among the more alarming artefacts of the Victorian Education Department history is a battered, leatherbound ledger book whose handwritten entries catalogue the daily operations of the Teachers Tribunal between 1946 and 1977.Among other things, this ledger directly contradicts the picture of teacher discipline being presented to the Victorian government in the Teachers Tribunal annual reports.
The tribunal's ledger contradicts the picture of teacher discipline it presented in its annual reports to parliament. In response to further questions from ABC Investigations, the Victorian Education Department confirmed that all of the records listed as "not transferred" to the PROV "are listed as held by the department", and that the department was committed to supporting "any investigations into historical abuse in Victorian schools, including providing any records or documentation that can assist the Beaumaris Board of Inquiry.
Most startlingly, in his final year on the Victorian Education Department's payroll, Sword received a 50 per cent pay rise, before in 1987 being given the designation: "retirement normal". At the inquiry's announcement, Andrews was flanked by Glen Fearnett and Timothy Courtney, two determined men who'd survived sexual abuse at the hands of Beaumaris Primary teachers and set their sights on ensuring two things.
In 2021, former VFL and AFL player Rod Owen told the ABC his story of being abused at Beaumaris as a child. So Fearnett, Courtney and other survivors and families then began their small but spirited campaign to seek overdue accountability. Even so, it came as a shock to Grimley to hear the stories from survivors of abuse in Victoria's public education system and the lawyers who'd taken up their cases against the Department of Education.
Stuart Grimley, a former sex crimes detective, was elected to Victorian parliament as a representative of Derryn Hinch's Justice Party. Where a government school teacher has previously been criminally convicted of historical abuse, specialist abuse lawyers typically seek to establish both the state's vicarious liability for that employee and their conduct, and its negligence in allowing the abuse to occur. The bulk of these cases are resolved by mediation rather than in courtrooms.
"And they will not admit that the abuse happened, almost across the board, unless there is a criminal conviction, in which case they'll partially admit it. They'll deny liability, even when there are a dozen cases related to the perpetrator.
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