Legally Beyond

Kerrie Anglin is a woman of many talents. Currently serving as Senior School Key Pastoral Care Teacher at St Peters Springfield, Kerrie is also a teacher and coordinator of Legal Studies, serves as WHS and Compliance Officer, is an admitted lawyer and a committee member and conference convener for the Queensland Chapter of the Australia & New Zealand Education Law Association. Now she has added one more title to this impressive list being that of a published author.

MAI THATCHER

A dedicated teacher in the St Peters Springfield community for the past seven years, Kerrie has recently co-authored a book titled Law and Ethics for Australian Teachers. The book, which took almost twoand-half years to complete, has been written to support teachers, school administrators and school authorities to navigate and better understand professional, legal and ethical school issues they may encounter in the classroom or wider school environment in a way that is easy to navigate.

This project began when Kerrie met with the parent of a former Springfield Old Scholar who also worked in the education industry. After some discussion they saw the potential to improve teachers' understanding of their legal obligations in a professional context and discussed the possibility of writing a book for this purpose. Kerrie explains, “the more I delved into the research the more I saw the need for teachers to know this sort of information…better still, that they had legal obligations that needed to be met.”

Being both a teacher and lawyer played an important part in the creation of the book.

“I first became interested in legislation and the way it appears in everyday life while living in Canberra,” says Kerrie. “My husband is a lawyer and had the riveting job of drafting the Commonwealth Work Health Safety and harmonization laws between 2008-2011. I would peruse and proofread some of the draft documents and found that I was becoming fascinated with the case law as well as thinking about how this would apply in the teaching world.”

Taking existing knowledge, qualifications and experience, Kerrie and her fellow authors have created a resource to explain topics such as Duty of Care, Mandatory Reporting, Family Court Orders and Parenting Plans, Suspensions and Exclusions and other legal issues. Chapters in the book include case studies and legislation from all states, detailed scenarios, definitions of key terms and end of chapter questions to help readers understand a variety of issues. In the future, Kerrie aspires to have the book adopted in tertiary education for those studying in education, pre-service teaching and the workplace as professional development.

The College would like to congratulate Kerrie on her amazing achievement and take pride in her dedication to her service and support to the wider community and next generation of teachers, pursuing our mission statement of ‘Excellence in Christian Co-Education’.

The book Law and Ethics for Australian Teachers (Mark Butlin, Noeleen McNamara and Kerrie Anglin), is published by Cambridge University Press and will be available to purchase in June through Angus & Robertson, Dymocks and Booktopia.