The West Australian Education Minister has apologised to the families of Kimberley high school students impacted by the handling of a truancy crisis that involved a strategy to tackle a spike in youth suicide.
The state government launched a review into the department's rollout of student attendance plans at Halls Creek Senior High School after an ABC investigation revealed families had not been consulted and that the majority of the 225 attendance plans had been drawn up in four days.
The attendance plans were a recommendation of the ombudsman, who conducted a review into the deaths of two students from the high school who took their own lives in 2018 and 2019.
The state coroner found poor school attendance was a common factor in the deaths of young people in the town between 2012 and 2016.
Education Minister Sue Ellery tabled the report in parliament on Thursday.
"I would like to apologise to the family of the Halls Creek student whose death triggered the review by the ombudsman," she said.
"That death should have served to respectfully improve student engagement.
"The report I am tabling today shows that it did not."
'Multiple points of failure'
The report, compiled after weeks spent speaking with parents and education bureaucrats in Halls Creek, highlighted "multiple points of failure" in the implementation of the ombudsman's recommendations.
The report found that the development of student attendance plans for at-risk children had been complicated by the onset of COVID-19 and many families "going bush" to avoid the virus.
It said the department missed an opportunity to revise the deadline for the plans and reconsider its approach.
It found the community was confused and concerned about how the plans would be implemented during the pandemic and that human error led to erroneous reports of improvements in student attendance.
"It is now clear that the work in response to the ombudsman's recommendation was not done to the scale or with the follow-up necessary to make a difference to students' engagement with school, and the opportunity to honour that loss of life was wasted," Ms Ellery said.
"I would also like to apologise to the students in Halls Creek and their families for this missed opportunity."
Commitment to action
Ms Ellery said the Education Department would commit to a raft of measures to improve attendance at Halls Creek District High School, including an Aboriginal advisory group, the development of training modules to help prepare student plans in the future and the establishment of a central project management office to help with oversight.
The department has also accepted all nine recommendations from the inquiry's report.
Halls Creek grandmother, former Nationals candidate and Bunuba-Kija woman Millie Hill said the apology was a welcome acknowledgement of the pain families have been through.
"I'm finally glad they're starting to listen to the community and the concerns that we have for our kids here," she said.
Ms Hill said the department could have launched an inquiry earlier if they had worked more closely with locals, but the commitments it had made to turn around Halls Creek's dire attendance rates was heartening.
"I'd really like to see our attendance rate in the next 12 months be 100 per cent," she said.
"We all need to work together to actually make this happen.
"I'd like to see the whole community come together with the school and all the other government agencies in town and work together on this."
