A decade ago, school discipline policies emphasised student welfare and the school's pastoral care role. Government guidelines required schools to have a range of mandatory alternatives to suspension. That is, suspension was to be the last, not the first, response to incidents. This shift has been driven by underlying processes throughout the public education system. Faced with ever declining funds, schools, except in wealthy areas, are unable to provide a decent education.
Schools now have to find their own methods of raising money.
In fact, school principals, empowered to act as both prosecutor and judge in determining disciplinary outcomes, are under budgetary pressure to suspend or exclude those students who require the most help. School programs oriented towards equity and student welfare are being run down or eliminated outright. Funding for the Disadvantaged Schools Program, set up in the mid-1970s by the federal government to lessen the gap between rich and poor schools, has been frozen. The other major national program dealing with student welfare, the Students at Risk program, targetting students likely to drop out of school, had its funding successively reduced from 1994 on and was completely axed in 1996. The teachers' trade union, the NSW Teachers Federation, has also facilitated this turn.