20 June 2025
The Down Syndrome Australia Consortium (DSA Consortium) and Inclusion Australia provided this submission to inform the development of nationally consistent standards for approaches to bullying.
An effective and responsive anti-bullying policy is essential to creating a universally inclusive and accessible education system for students with disability. Many students with disability do not have the support that they need to attend a local, mainstream school.
We support a nationally consistent standard approach to bullying. Such an approach could be flexible enough to apply across a range of settings and for different age and developmental groups.
Beyond a consistent national standard, we believe that there is a requirement to address institutional forms of abuse, violence and exploitation in educational settings, from gatekeeping access to schools, to exclusionary discipline and segregation.
All of these practices form part of, and reinforce, the community attitudes to disability which allow bullying to occur. There must be appropriate support people with rigorous training, and appropriate referrals into other systems where behaviour and criminality can be addressed.