A school assistant who twice slapped a six-year-old student in the face when he was misbehaving has failed to get off a statewide blacklist.
The learning support officer said the boy had been running around and generally misbehaving when she "physically" pulled him out of a classroom in a NSW school in May 2019.
At the school office, she pushed him to sit on a sofa "in fear that his violence may escalate" and said she "mentally snapped and slapped on his face" when he called her a bitch.
When the boy said something else, the school worker slapped his face again.
The boy seemed to come "back to himself" and stopped fighting, sat down and started sobbing, the woman said.
She later accepted that after the first slap, the boy yelled "I don't want to be here at school" and she screamed back words to the effect of "I don't want to be here at school either".
The incident, witnessed by the school's administration officer, led to the NSW education department to immediately place the casually employed woman on a blacklist.
Despite accepting the conduct was serious, the woman defended her actions to the department and the Industrial Relations Commission in the context of the boy's "anti-social behaviour".
She said she'd "acted closely to the code of conduct" and that she'd never been trained to deal with children like the boy.
A department official said she couldn't think of "any circumstance where it would be reasonable to slap a student on the face, particularly on more than one occasion".
IRC Commissioner John Murphy agreed, dismissing the woman's appeal on Friday after finding nothing that rendered the woman's conduct "anything other than serious misconduct" warranting termination of her employment.
Various names and locations, including that of the school, were suppressed.
The matter was referred to police at the of the incident but the boy's parents ultimately indicated they didn't want to purse it criminally, the commission was told.
