Dr. Niall Muldoon:

The Senator asked about the data. Since 2013, the Department should have been able to gather what incidence of bullying there has been. We need to start drilling down into that and investigating whether it has related to racism or homophobia, for example. At the moment, bullying can be a catch-all for many different issues that need to be dealt with within schools. We have lost seven or eight years of that sort of data-gathering because the Department did not do it, so we need to get into that immediately in order that we can have proper, disaggregated data and help the individual schools. There are successes to be learned from that as well.