Public school communities across Western Australia could send a clear message to the state government this weekend that they want wellbeing support roles to be secular and directly employed through the state’s education department.
Delegates attending the annual conference of the peak body representing parents of public school students, the Western Australian Council of State School Organisations (WACSSO), will consider a motion about the outsourcing arrangements for the student wellbeing roles. The motion asks for WACSSO to advocate for every public school to have “state government employed and funded wellbeing positions that are permanent, secular, professional, with direct employment by schools”.
If the motion is supported, WACSSO’s advocacy for direct government employment of student wellbeing officers will pose a threat to the outsourcing arrangements for chaplaincy roles funded by the state and federal governments under the National Student Wellbeing Program (NSWP).
Currently, the NSWP – to which the West Australian government adds millions of dollars each year – requires public schools to recruit chaplains or secular wellbeing officers through third-party providers. In Western Australia, these labour hire firms are mostly Christian and require that chaplains have religious credentials, such as demonstrating “a living and personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and “active engagement in the life of a Christian Church”.
The Maylands Peninsula Primary School’s Parents & Carers (P&C) group has put forward the motion to the WACSSO conference, arguing that the current model of contracting out student wellbeing positions in public schools was “no longer fit for purpose”.
“Employees are reporting low wages, unpaid holidays, complex employer arrangements and insecure employment. The state government should uphold public school values of secure employment, wages that reflect education and training, inclusion and equal opportunity for all,” says the preamble to the motion.
Earlier this year, the Rationalist Society of Australia reported that the Cook government had begun a trial allowing one public school (Anzac Terrace Primary School) the ability to directly employ a person for the role without having to source a chaplain or wellbeing officer via third-party labour hire firms.
The Maylands Peninsula P&C has, for a number of years, been at the forefront of the push from the public school sector for secular and directly employed wellbeing officers instead of religious chaplains. In 2022, it was successful in having WACSSO delegates vote overwhelmingly in support of governments funding the employment of professional non-clinical student welfare officers instead of religious chaplains. Earlier that year, the Maylands Peninsula school community voted to remove religious-based discrimination in the chaplaincy role within their school.
Allowing schools to directly employ wellbeing officers through the state’s Department of Education would mean the removal of religious-based criteria previously described by the state’s equal opportunity commissioner as constituting “prima-facie religious conviction discrimination” under state laws.
For a number of years, the RSA has been calling for the end of religious-based discrimination in the NSWP and an end to outsourcing arrangements.
Follow our campaign on school chaplaincy.
If you want to support our work, please make a donation or become a member.
Si Gladman is Executive Director at the Rationalist Society of Australia. He also hosts ‘The Secular Agenda’ podcast.
Image: MChe Lee (Unsplash).