A mother asked a fairly elementary question last week: When is enough finally enough?

Her primary school-aged son, she says, was physically assaulted by another student at school and required medical treatment. She claims there had been previous incidents involving the same student and, within days of returning after the alleged assault, further bullying allegedly occurred.

According to the mother, her son is afraid to go to school.

There are facts outsiders cannot know, and disciplinary matters the school quite properly cannot discuss publicly. This is one parent’s account, not a judicial finding. Strip away the competing accounts, privacy requirements and administrative processes and one uncomfortable fact remains: the child who was allegedly victimised is, according to his mother, the one afraid to attend school.

Which raises a considerably larger question: What about the victim?

If we were to take the example of Queensland, statewide figures suggest a similar underlying problem is present in many schools. The Queensland Audit Office found approximately 76,400 bullying incidents were recorded in state schools during 2023, involving 56,121 students reported for bullying behaviour. Most striking was not simply the volume, but the recurrence. Seventeen students had more than 21 bullying incidents recorded against them. One had 79.

The figures do not tell us that those 79 incidents were equally serious, violent, or directed at the same victim. They do tell us that the system encountered bullying behaviour associated with the same student again and again. The first incident tells us something about the child. By the tenth, it seems reasonable to start asking questions about the institution that dealt with the previous nine.

Yet the Auditor General found something rather revealing. Queensland had structured data capable of analysing students repeatedly displaying bullying behaviour. It did not have equivalent system-wide data about students experiencing bullying in a form that permitted the same analysis. Victim information could be buried in free text, but the department could not readily use it to examine repeated victimisation and its relationship with attendance, academic performance, and wellbeing.

Queensland’s bureaucracy could identify a student associated with 79 bullying incidents. It could not readily answer the corresponding question: How often was the same child on the receiving end?

We have become better at counting bullies than counting their victims.

To its credit, Queensland has not ignored the problem. Since the Audit Office report, the government has committed substantial resources to Rapid Support Teams, wellbeing services and Behaviour Boost. The Queensland government reported this year that overall behaviour incidents had fallen by an average of 8 per cent across the state following Behaviour Boost’s first year.

Good. Improvement should be acknowledged when it occurs.

However, statewide averages have an unfortunate habit of smoothing out the people having the worst experience. Queensland’s 2025 School Opinion Survey found 82.9 per cent of students agreed they felt safe at school. That is reassuring. Only 64 per cent, however, agreed student behaviour was well managed. Among Year 8 students, the figure fell to 51.4 per cent.

A school can be perfectly safe for most children while being utterly miserable for a handful of repeatedly targeted ones. Bullies do not thoughtfully rotate their victims to ensure everybody receives an equal share.

More recent disciplinary figures make the picture harder to dismiss. Queensland recorded 20,368 school disciplinary absences attributed to physical aggression in 2023, 20,146 in 2024 and 21,580 in 2025. Total disciplinary absences, meanwhile, fell from 81,918 to 71,805. Physical aggression therefore grew from roughly a quarter of disciplinary absences to three in ten.

That does not mean every disciplinary absence represented an assault or a different student, nor does it establish some convenient causal relationship between fewer disciplinary absences and greater aggression. It does establish that serious physical behaviour remains rather stubbornly present.

Nor are students its only potential victims. Queensland Department of Education figures released under Right to Information show workers compensation claims for assault related injuries among state school teachers increased from 324 in 2022 to 635 in 2024. Not every claim can be attributed to a student, and the figures establish no causal relationship with disciplinary policy. They do, however, make the department’s stated ‘zero tolerance’ for occupational violence rather more than an academic proposition.

Zero tolerance sounds splendid in a policy document. Presumably it sounds rather different while being hit.

This is where discussions about school discipline tend to divide into two equally unsatisfying camps. One demands punishment. The other demands understanding.

Schools require both, but neither should come first.

Protection should.

There are good reasons education departments are cautious about blunt disciplinary responses. Disability, trauma, developmental difficulties, mental health, and disadvantage can all influence behaviour. Children with disability are disproportionately represented among Queensland students receiving disciplinary action. Suspension and exclusion can themselves damage educational outcomes. Rehabilitation matters. Procedural fairness matters. The educational rights of the child responsible for harmful behaviour matter.

That said, explanation is not permission. And the victim has not volunteered to become part of somebody else’s rehabilitation program.

We are often reminded that the child responsible for bullying has rights. Quite right. Those rights are not the exclusive property of the child causing the harm. The victim has them too.

The right of one child to an education cannot depend upon another child surrendering their right to a safe one. This is the uncomfortable edge of the modern discussion about inclusion. We quite properly ask what support the child displaying serious behaviour requires. We should be equally interested in the child who starts avoiding the toilets, changes where they eat lunch, stops catching the bus, misses classes or eventually refuses to attend school.

If protecting one child’s right to remain in the classroom means another becomes too frightened to enter it, the question is no longer whether we have protected a child’s right to education. It is whose right to education we have chosen to protect.

Administratively, the victim remains enrolled. Practically, somebody has driven them from their education.

That is not inclusion. It is displacement.

None of this requires the automatic expulsion of every bully. Children make mistakes. Interventions work. Principals require discretion because two superficially similar incidents can have completely different circumstances. A behaviour plan may be appropriate. Counselling may be appropriate. Restorative practice may be appropriate. Suspension may be appropriate. Reintegration may be appropriate.

But recurrence has to mean something.

If serious behaviour happens again, whatever happened previously was not enough. That does not automatically mean the previous response was negligent. It means the next response cannot proceed on the comforting assumption that the previous one worked.

Responsibility matters here. Classroom teachers can intervene, protect students, document incidents, and refer serious behaviour. School leadership can investigate and impose consequences. Education departments establish the rules within which those decisions are made. Governments determine and fund the system.

When serious behaviour repeatedly survives the interventions designed to stop it, responsibility cannot remain indefinitely with the classroom teacher, much less with the child reporting it.

Australia is now preparing another national response. Following the 2025 Anti-Bullying Rapid Review, education ministers agreed in February this year to a National Framework for Addressing Bullying in Australian Schools. Education sectors and schools are expected to reflect its expectations in their policies and procedures by Term 1, 2027.

Australian education has rarely encountered a problem it could not improve by giving it another framework.

To its credit, much of this one is sensible. It expects reasonable efforts to initiate a response to reported or observed bullying within two school days and, importantly, clear and fair escalation pathways where interventions have failed to resolve an incident.

Quite right. The question is whether escalation actually results in the victim being safe.

Two days to initiate a response is not the same thing as making the behaviour stop. That should be the test of the new framework. Not how many schools produce compliant policies, how many staff complete professional development, how quickly reports are acknowledged or how comprehensively interventions are documented. Those things may all be necessary.

They are not the outcome.

Did the serious behaviour stop? Was the same child victimised again? And if it continued, did the response escalate until the victim was safe?

‘The standard you walk past is the standard you accept…’ does not mean schools should expel every difficult child. Nor does zero tolerance require zero judgement. But zero tolerance must eventually mean something to the person on the receiving end.

Modern education has, to be fair, advanced considerably beyond simply walking past a problem. It can now record it, investigate it, convene a meeting about it, devise an intervention for it, evaluate the intervention and document the entire process in considerable detail.

The only stubbornly analogue question is whether the child gets bullied again on Tuesday.

If they do, the paperwork may demonstrate that something was done. It cannot demonstrate that it worked.

Education departments have a plan for the bully.

As another national framework comes into effect, perhaps it is time we measured those plans from the other end.

What happened to the victim?