Conduct, Complaints & Grievances

Catholic Education in the Diocese of Cairns is committed to safe, ethical and legal workplaces based on the respectful and responsible behaviour of all members of our system and school communities.

To assist with this, we have a Code of Conduct – Staff and a Code of Conduct for Parents, Volunteers and Visitors

If you have a grievance or complaint refer to our Grievance Policy and Grievance Procedures. These are summarised in a series of posters:

If you are unable to resolve a complaint or concern through these processes, and the matter meets the threshold for reportable conduct (see below), there is an independent confidential hotline service, STOPline, which can be contacted by phone, fax, email, post or app. Refer to our Whistleblower Protection Policy and the Diocese of Cairns STOPline site.

A summary of the STOPline whistleblower service is provided below.

Catholic Education has a range of other policies and guidelines to guide expected workplace behaviour:

Equity Contact Officers

Catholic Education Services is committed to building and maintaining positive workplace environments where issues of inappropriate behaviour and staff misconduct will not be tolerated. 

The appointment and support of Equity Contact Officers across the Diocese is an indication of the organisation’s ongoing commitment to take incidents of discrimination, harassment, and other inappropriate behaviour seriously.

Equity Contact Officers provide a critical role in assisting staff who believe they have been subjected to inappropriate workplace behaviours including bullying, discrimination, harassment, and behaviour which breaches the Code of Conduct.

Equity Contact Officers are the first point of contact to help employees make choices about how to seek resolution if they believe they are experiencing unfair treatment in the workplace.

List of Equity Contact Officers

Use the following list to contact a CES or CELC Equity Contact Officer.

Whistleblower Hotline

The Diocese of Cairns provides a Whistleblower Hotline through an independent and confidential service provider, STOPline.

This service is available to all members of the Catholic Education community including staff, volunteers, parents, and students.

The Whistleblower hotline is not for complaints or grievances (refer to Complaints and Grievance Procedure) nor does it replace our obligations for mandatory reporting for Student Protection matters. While we encourage you to use our existing processes to report and resolve concerns, the hotline service is available when our existing processes have not been able to resolve an issue relating to reportable conduct (see below) or where absolute confidentiality is required.

The specific role of the hotline is to receive items relating to ‘reportable conduct’ that the whistleblower reasonably and in good faith believes is:

• dishonest;
• fraudulent;
• corrupt;
• illegal (including theft, drug sale/use, violence or threatened violence and criminal damage against property);
• in breach of Commonwealth or state legislation or local authority by-laws;
• unethical (representing a breach of employer codes of conduct or generally);
• other serious improper conduct;
• an unsafe work practice;
• representative of gross mismanagement, serious and substantial waste and/or a repeated breach of administrative procedures; and
• any other conduct which may cause financial or non-financial loss to the Diocese of Cairns or its agencies (including Cairns Catholic Education and schools) or be otherwise detrimental to their interests.

The STOPline service (www.doc.stoplinereport.com) and the Catholic Education Whistleblower Protection Policy provide measures to protect whistleblowers acting in good faith from adverse consequences.

STOPline enables members of our system and school communities to report, in good faith, suspected misconduct via telephone, email, internet, facsimile or mail, to an independent organisation with trained staff who will receive concerns confidentially (and anonymously if wished).

The service provides the confidential information (without identifiers) to the Whistleblower Governance Officer, who is the Diocesan Manager, Professional Standards. The program then places procedural requirements on dealing with and finalising the outcome of the disclosure.

Cairns Catholic Education, as part of the Diocese of Cairns, believes that all members of our education and school communities should be able to assist in ensuring our system and schools maintain their status as ethical undertakings.

We are adopting best practice in this aspect of corporate governance and will be compliant with international and Australian corporate governance standards.

Disclosures to STOPline will require information including what is happening, where it is happening, how it is happening, who is doing the wrong thing and why they are doing the wrong thing.

How to make a disclosure to STOPline:

Phone: 1300 30 45 50

Fax: 03 9882 4480

Email:  doc@stopline.com.au

Website: doc.stoplinereport.com

Mail: c/o The Stopline, Locked Bag 8, Hawthorn Vic 3122

App: Search for STOPline in the iTunes App Store or Google Play to download the free app(Edit)