Safeguarding Children and Young People

The Department is committed to safeguarding the rights of all children and young people to have an education, to be heard, and to be kept safe from harm.

The Office of Safeguarding Children and Young People is working to ensure each person in the Department knows and understands that:

• safeguarding is the responsibility of everyone in the Department, and
• staff and volunteers must keep the child at the centre of all decisions that affect them.

The Office aims to help the Department be an exemplary child safe organisation – one where children are safe to learn, to have their say and to reach their goals.

Working Together – supporting early learning

Working Together offers free early learning and support to eligible children and their families in the year before Kindergarten.

It is delivered in partnership with selected Early Childhood Education and Care services across Tasmania.

Attending education and care in the early years sets a child up for a great start in life and a healthy future.

Strong Partnerships

The Department for Education, Children and Young People (DoE) and Education and Care (E&C) community work in partnership. We work together to help ensure best outcomes for Tasmania’s children and families.

Children and families are at the heart of our work. The Strong Partnerships Framework shows how DoE and the E&C community work together. The Framework provides tools and resources, across seven domains. It supports both services, whether co-located or not, to work in stronger partnerships.

Through our partnership we contribute to the shared vision for Tasmanian children.

Tasmania’s Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy It takes a Tasmanian Village 2021 (PDF, 11MB)

This website will support DoE and E&C services to build and maintain Strong Partnerships. The website will be a dynamic resource, undergoing ongoing review and development.

Years 9 to 12 Project 

The Years 9 to 12 Project was established as a result of the 2016 Review of Years 9 to 12 Tasmania by the Australian Council for Educational Research which outlined a range of opportunities and recommendations to improve attendance, retention and attainment outcomes for students in Tasmania.

The purpose of the Years 9 to 12 Project is to enable all students to achieve their potential through Years 9 to 12 and beyond in further study, training and employment, and is a joint initiative of Catholic Education Tasmania, Independent Schools Tasmania, the Department for Education, Children and Young People, TasTAFE, the University of Tasmania, Skills Tasmania and the Office of Tasmanian Assessment, Standards and Certification.

Education Workforce Roundtable

The Minister’s Education Workforce Roundtable is a group of education leaders committed to taking action to deliver a quality education workforce for Tasmania. The Roundtable’s endeavours are a bold, new, and innovative approach in collaboration across the education sector, demonstrating passion for improving education quality and learning outcomes for all Tasmanians.

Child and Student Wellbeing Strategy

Children and young people who feel safe, connected and secure are more likely to engage in their learning. A strong sense of wellbeing enables learners to explore, experiment and engage actively in their learning environment with the confidence to take advantage of new opportunities. The latest Child and Student Wellbeing Strategy underpins our current and future efforts to keep children and young people safe, well and engaged in learning, across all of our learning environments . The Strategy supports our wellbeing goal under the Department’s Strategic Plan.

Revitalising School Farms

The Revitalising School Farms (RSF) initiative is designed to ensure school farms are managed as highly valued educational facilities that support the comprehensive and rigorous teaching and learning of food and fibre production/agriculture. Underpinning the RSF initiative is the Tasmanian Agricultural Education Framework (TAEF). Revitalising School Farms and the TAEF sit under the broader Primary Schools to Primary Industries initiative, which provides all schools access to high quality agricultural education planning and curriculum resources.

Years 11 and 12 Extension Schools

This initiative is providing more choice to students undertaking Years 11 and 12 at their local high school. The State Government is also breaking down the perception that education finishes in Year 10 and building the ambition for even more Tasmanian students to want to complete Year 12.

Respectful Relationships Education

The Tasmanian Department for Education, Children and Young People maintains a whole-of-system, research based approach to developing and maintaining respectful relationships education. An essential element of the Tasmanian Government’s Safe Homes, Safe Families Action Plan has been the development of an extensive range of resources which support schools, communities and individuals to understand why family violence occurs and how to reduce the occurrence of it. Updated in 2021, the resources have been designed to support school communities model positive environments and appropriate behaviours in which individuals know, understand and engage in equitable and respectful relationships.

Aboriginal Education Curriculum Resources

As part of the Tasmanian Government’s Resetting the Relationship with the Aboriginal community in Tasmania agenda, the Department for Education, Children and Young People has taken the lead on Priority Two: Introduce a focus on Tasmanian Aboriginal History and Culture into the delivery of the Australian Curriculum.

A number of professional learning videos with accompanying learning tasks are now available to schools from the Aboriginal Education Services page.

The purpose of this priority is to raise awareness and improve understanding of Tasmanian Aboriginal histories and cultures in schools and to raise aspirations for levels of attainment and further education for Aboriginal students.

Student Voice Project

Evidence shows that capturing student voice* in schools has many benefits:

• leads to improved student wellbeing
• drives student engagement
• can create positive change in classrooms and schools
• encourages students to have a say about local, national and world issues that affect them.

When we take time to listen, students’ aspirations can drive exciting new goals for our schools and our system.
When students know we are listening to them:
it improves their self-worth

• they engage meaningfully in their own academic success
• they take more interest in their learning. ​

In 2021 the Department developed a guide to help teachers and staff to improve their approach to facilitating student voice and empowering learner agency. As part of the Department’s wider approach to school improvement it has a consistent, coherent focus aligned with several global, national and local frameworks focused on children and young people:

• empowerment
• agency
• participation
• engagement.

The guide includes examples of when students have shared their ideas about their learning.

The online is a helpful resource of best practice for staff to use, to encourage and capture student voice.

* The word ‘voice’ refers to all forms of communication and communication supports.