A Brisbane girls’ school has brought in cyber experts and counsellors while referring itself to the Australian Information Commissioner after a document containing notes describing students’ appearances, medical diagnoses and family backgrounds was accessed by those pupils.<\/p>\n
Somerville House teachers wrote notes about the then incoming year 7 students in 2021 that included descriptions about their hair, their popularity and demeanour, referring to some as “odd” or “rude”.<\/p>\n
The written comments also included information about how students performed in subjects and assessments as well as details of their medical diagnoses and treatment.<\/p>\n
The notes also had information about their parents’ marital status and described some as “intense” when referring to their involvement in their child’s learning.<\/p>\n
The ABC has been told students were able to access the document while looking for another file uploaded by teachers onto Microsoft Teams.<\/p>\n
In an emailed letter to parents on Friday, principal Dr Sandra Hastie said the school was working with “cyber experts” who were independently and thoroughly investigating the incident.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The ABC was told students were able to access the document.\u00a0 (ABC News: Timothy Ailwood)<\/p>\n
“First and foremost, I’d like to acknowledge the hurt you are experiencing and sincerely apologise for your distress,” the emailed letter said.<\/p>\n
“We’re extremely disappointed by the nature of these comments, which fall short of our values, especially compassion, integrity and respect.”<\/p>\n
The school said it had made counselling available to students and families until the end of February.<\/p>\n
“We are committed to adhering to our regulatory and legal obligations, and we have notified the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC),” the letter said.<\/p>\n
The students are sitting senior exams next week.<\/p>\n
Parents told the ABC the first day of tests had been pushed back, after students had lost access to school resources following the incident.<\/p>\n
In the letter to parents, the school said it may change exam timetables to respond to the incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Brisbane girls’ school has brought in cyber experts and counsellors while referring itself to the Australian Information…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,651,72492,36683,5315,44,94,701,169698],"class_list":["post-300916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-brisbane","tag-cyber","tag-experts","tag-investigation","tag-news","tag-qld","tag-queensland","tag-somerville-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}