Police allege Brittany Higgins is under threat, page-96

@pow4ade; prior to the late 1970s the Victorian Ed Dept employed many people who were neither trained to teach nor who'd have passed a police check. Class sizes ranged up to 40 students - so many they had to walk single file into classrooms and around desks.

My generation of fully qualified and trained teachers tried very hard to change that situation. We often locked horns with what was a hostile bureaucracy and a state government with a Henry Bolte hangover. We even used to go on strike to have teachers behaving badly held to account - the VED usually just moved them onto another unidentified school.

As for your religious schools comment - that's NOT my experience! My public schools were required to enrol the damaged kids forced out of them for a whole range of reasons. Some of what we became privy to when enrolling those kids was sickening stuff and some of it has never been made public because parents didn't want to risk complaining to Police.

In public schools compulsory teacher registration initiated by teachers unions, mandatory reporting and police checks made a huge difference.