As school leaders, teachers, and staff, we do all we can to provide optimal conditions for learning despite limited resources. Troubled lives and troubling behaviours only compound the complexities of any one school day. What we give, and what it takes from all of us to be involved every minute and hour of the school day, defies easy description or comprehension, most especially for those who have plenty of opinions but no expertise, or experience, beyond their own memories of school.

Our problems go to existential questions involving the lives of young people principally, as well as their families and all of us as a society. We should be asking this question: Are any of our schools fit for purpose?

An effective educational process, it must be emphasised, involves social relationships that extend well beyond the school gate. The process of teaching and learning is in essence "relational", and a successful relationship is dependent upon unconditional positive regard - a teacher's capacity to empathise, to keep our sense of humour, and to appreciate the context of our concerns for any young person.

Being mindful of the relatively recent emphasis on social and emotional learning, and the care we take for our students' mental health, we should make the effort to understand the work of teachers. Consider for a moment that year 8 students last had a straightforward year of teaching in their year 5. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has, for two years now, disrupted the flow of continuity that schools have in the past been able to provide - and this disruption has been going on longer if drought, bushfires and now floods are included. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, discombobulated, but nevertheless we are all still desperately trying to establish and maintain some semblance of routines that we believe defined normalcy.

Our social context is one of disintegration; the fragmentation of life and work, home and family. How can we pretend that social and economic disruption and hardship, all of which is inherently violent, is not affecting, and infecting, civil society? Can we say, with any honesty, that violence is an issue limited to schools, or - extraordinarily - confined to one? Almost every public institution has a poster touting a zero-tolerance approach to violent and disrespectful behaviour toward their staff. Calwell's story resounds with all those who are intimately involved with people's lives, and who are regularly subjected to violence at work: child-protection workers, teachers and early-childhood educators and carers, aged-care workers, nurses, police, ambulance, and fire officers. When unionised workers from any of these sectors stop work to protest such occurrences, we're deemed lawbreakers and attract fines of thousands of dollars. The organised violence of the state is to keep us silent and disorganised.

All the elements listed in Calwell's WorkSafe notices are widespread social behaviours. There is not anything that is happening, or has happened, at Calwell which does not have its expression elsewhere in our society. The search for causes is vexed, and there are short- and long-term solutions, most of which will not be found within any school's corridors. What we do know is that there is growing inequality, and those who identify their cause with the wealthiest are doing all they can to protect their interests by seeking the social and economic power such privilege engenders.

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The inequality so apparent in our school systems is a microcosm of our larger society. The implication that schools like Calwell are somehow failing points to a larger social tragedy inflicted upon multitudes. Ten years ago, the Gonski review recognised something must be done to redress such blatant class privilege. Yet not one political party has taken steps to overcome power structures which can only benefit the wealthiest. Politicians, for the most part, are a cast of agents who perpetuate privilege. No matter who wins our elections, we can expect little to change for the better.

I have spent the best part of two weekends applying for Kitchen Garden grants, with no prospect of $20 million raining on Calwell as it did for Canberra Grammar. Education is important, we are told, because it has the power to overcome poverty, and structural and systemic social and economic inequalities will disappear if everyone has a degree. Naive? Most certainly. Yet this pap is regularly doled out.

Public school teachers now face the additional challenge of organising a response, part of which is exposing our reality not only to the wider public, but to each other. The WorkSafe report is but a tool to draw attention to a problem. Calwell cannot be used as a scapegoat to distract us, and to obfuscate. The missing ingredient has been our direct involvement, as school leaders and teachers. We too have choices. We are only one of the many canaries in the mine, but we are not, and will not be, victims. We are sounding the alarm as we can no longer accept the silence. We have been too polite for far too long.