NSW tribunal upholds SafeWork notices against a school system after a 14-year employee's probe dragged on for 10 months
A New South Wales tribunal has confirmed what employment lawyers have been warning HR teams about for months: the investigation itself, not just the alleged misconduct behind it, is now treated as a workplace health and safety risk in its own right.
In Secretary, New South Wales Department of Education v SafeWork NSW, a 2026 case before the NSW Industrial Relations Commission, upheld two improvement notices issued against the state's Department of Education, finding that the way it ran a misconduct investigation exposed a long-serving employee to psychosocial harm. The case has been described by lawyers as confirming that "the investigation process itself is a psychosocial hazard."
The employee, a business manager with 14 years' service, was told in April 2023 she was under investigation, stood down and moved to lower-level administrative duties at another site, with no detail of the allegations against her.
She attempted suicide shortly afterwards and survived. The investigation ran for close to a year before SafeWork NSW inspected the Department's processes and issued the notices in February 2024, one covering the timeliness of investigations and communication with staff, the other covering the suitability of alternative duties assigned during an inquiry.
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