An IT failure in the Queensland Education Department meant 644 suspected cases of child sexual abuse were not relayed to police.
School principals attempted to report the cases, which took place from 22 January and involved students whose parents or guardians were deemed to be acting in their interests over the abuse, via the department’s One School online portal.
But they never reached police because of a coding error during an upgrade to the reporting system, which was never tested in an oversight that has led to a departmental staffer and a contractor being stood aside.
Queensland’s education minister, Kate Jones, said she was “clearly outraged” at the “system failure”, which was discovered only on Thursday when a principal followed up on a report and found it was not received.
Police were separately aware of some of the previously unreported cases, having examined most of them in the past 24 hours.
There were no urgent cases of children in danger yet identified, but police were expected to take weeks to examine all the lost reports.
Jones said principals had been receiving automated responses from the system that their reports were received, but they were not.
They were among more than 3,800 cases of suspected child abuse or neglect reported by schools to police since 22 January.
The others, which involved cases where relatives were suspected of abusing children, were relayed.
The reporting system was “streamlined” in January on the recommendation of the Carmody inquiry into child protection.
Jones sought to put the blame on the former Liberal National government, which was in power until a few weeks after the system upgrade.
“If you are making a change to the IT system, the very first thing you would do is test that the system properly,” Jones said, adding there had not been enough “checks and balances”.
“When I talk to principals, making complaints about sexual abuse is one of the toughest part of the job,” she said.
“I’m deeply sorry this has happened ... We owe it to Queensland students to do better than that.”
The director-general of the Education Department, Jim Watterson, who was in charge of the department at the time, said he was shocked and disappointed.
“It should have been brought to our attention much earlier than this,” he said.
