Archive for October 2025

Heather Holbrook, a school social worker in the district, describes what some of the students she works with are facing. “Their house was gone, flooded, deep flooded, and so they couldn’t live there anymore, and they’ve been homeless ever since, really,” Holbrook says. “They’ve not found housing.”

Eugene Arcand is one of more than 6,500 survivors and witnesses of the residential school system who spoke to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when three commissioners, led by Murray Sinclair, spent six years gathering testimonies and millions of federal records. On December 15, 2015, the TRC presented its Final Report on the impacts of residential schools, just eighteen years after the last institution closed its doors.

For more than fifty years, I’ve been learning. For more than twenty years, I’ve been teaching. If at this stage I can’t profess something worth hearing, then I ought to quit and sell insurance.

Our investigation was sparked by an interview with Susan Christie, whose father spent two years in Castlehill, the largest care home in Inverness. It is billed as a luxury home and charges up to £1,800 per week…. In order to compare Castlehill to the 1,000 other care homes across Scotland, the BBC sent a Freedom of Information request to sector regulator, the Care Inspectorate, to ask which care homes in Scotland had the most complaints upheld against them. Castlehill topped the list with 10 complaints upheld in 2024.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, loneliness has been on the rise among young Australians since 2008, with 22% of 18–25-year-olds reporting they feel lonely often/always and up to 91% of young South Australians saying they feel lonely often/sometimes. A new study by researchers from Flinders University’s College of Education, Psychology and Social Work has shed further light on the issue of loneliness at school, finding that schools can be emotionally isolating environments where loneliness is shaped by harmful social dynamics.

Two years on from the Tasmanian child sexual abuse commission of inquiry’s final report, K has mixed emotions. She was abused by one of her high school teachers in the 1990s, was one of the witnesses who gave the commissioners a harrowing insight into child sexual abuse in Tasmania and the systemic failures of successive governments to act.