Trent and Rebecca

At his school, only eight year 12 students chose to sit exams to determine university entry. Trent was one of them.

But in his mid-year exams, something went wrong.

‘[Trent] re‐wrote questions, wrote questions back to front and as if in a mirror, drew pictures and wrote the phonetic alphabet,’ his mother Rebecca told the Royal Commission.

He did this in every exam. The school became aware of it after the second exam, but didn’t tell his parents and let him continue. The school later said they had planned to ‘deal with it after the long weekend’.

But they didn’t deal with it. Before school resumed after the break, Trent took his own life.

Rebecca said she had informed the school about Trent’s mental health diagnosis a year earlier. She sent follow-up emails, but never received a response. After the third email, she had contacted the school psychologist directly.

‘She told us that she would discuss [Trent] at the next staff meeting she would have with senior staff,’ Rebecca said.

But Rebecca never heard from the psychologist again.

‘Knowing what we know now we should have chased her up,’ she said.

But Rebecca had assumed the school was supporting Trent. She only discovered later that none of his teachers had been informed of his mental illness.

After his death, Rebecca asked a manager from the hospital to ring the school on her behalf to make sure they were looking after Trent’s friends. If any of the kids wished to ‘say goodbye to their friend’, the manager relayed, they were welcome to come to the hospital.

But the school only informed one student, who was told to keep off social media and not tell any of Trent’s friends. Hours later, in the middle of a class, Trent’s best friend learnt his friend had died.

‘[He had] to excuse himself to go and ring his parents.’

Rebecca says ‘dealing with the school’ since her son’s death has ‘been awful’. Individual teachers have been deceitful, disrespectful, unprofessional and have breached countless guidelines and procedures.

The school never publicly acknowledged Trent’s death. It refused to share details of Trent’s funeral, telling the family it was ‘against department of education guidelines’. The school discouraged students from talking about Trent’s death because it would upset people. Students had to push to have their friend and classmate acknowledged at graduation and in the yearbook.

The family petitioned the state coroner for an inquest into Trent’s death, and were refused. They complained to the education minister, but were told the school ‘could not have foreseen’ Trent’s death.

Rebecca found this ‘an outrageous thing to say’ given the school knew Trent ‘was suffering with anxiety and depression and had evidence of his clear mental distress in what he had written in his exams’.

Rebecca wants the school to be held accountable. She wants all teachers to undertake mandatory and comprehensive mental health training, and she wants the education department to ‘protect our children rather than protecting the schools’.

More than anything, she doesn’t want this to happen to another child.