A renowned Victorian private school is startled by claims that were beaten with belts by older students as part of informal 'punishments'.
Ballarat Grammar started an investigation with the help of the police into the allegations after a parent complained that their child had been beaten.
A letter was sent to parents on Thursday by headmaster Adam Heath in which it was explained that the school took the allegations seriously.
Mr Heath told the age that he was aware of 12 boys from year 11 to 7 years who were reportedly victims of the 'penal ring'.
He said that senior students in one of the schools had developed two male boarding houses the conviction that they had the right to work out physical punishments on younger boys they have observed, had stepped out of line.
“We have to be really open and honest with ourselves and say that if something is wrong in the guesthouse of one boys, it is really possible that it is second,” Mr. Heath told the publication.
“We have no confirmed allegations from the second house, but we are just that we work through it because we have our suspicions.”
He added that the police were involved by the school after the parent had complained and that he had since had regular contact with Ballarat detectives.
Ballarat Grammar School is one of the most expensive in regional Victoria, with a year 12 costumes that costs more than $ 46,000 in reimbursements (shown)
The school has also raised a consultant – in the form of the former director of Prince Alfred College in Adelaide – to perform an independent assessment of the school processes and to ensure that the situation is treated with transparency and fairness .
“It's terrible, and it's confronting, but we have to be there for our students and for their families while we work to discover what happened, and then to manage appropriate consequences that will all be made decisively,” said the Lord Heath.
Ballarat Grammar School is one of the most expensive in regional Victoria with academic reimbursements of year 12 that costs more than $ 26,000, and a year 12 boarding student student costs more than $ 46,000 in reimbursements.
It is the second Victorian private school in recent years that is affected by accusations of boys who beat each other.
In 2020 an annual 'Fight Club' was discovered that was held at Geelong Grammar School after a senior boy broke his hand in a boxing match.
It turned out that students would wait for teachers to go to bed to perform the tournaments, which were seen by the students as a transition ritual.
The school forbade the boxing matches and said it did not approve the behavior.
