The Tasmanian State Government put the provision of chaplaincy out for tender late last year.

Scripture Union Tasmania was chosen as the chaplaincy provider in mid-January, but wasn’t able to sign a contract with the Government until the day before school went back last week, which didn’t leave enough time to place chaplains in time for the start of term.

But CEO of SU Tasmania Ruth Pinkerton says most schools who have been granted funding should have chaplains in place by the end of next week.

“The tender process has to run for a specific time period, and so once it started they couldn’t finish it any earlier. We were all just struggling with making a bureaucratic process faster.

“We’re disappointed it turned out this way, and I think the Government were disappointed too, actually.”

She says for most schools, chaplains will be in place either this week or early next week. But there will be a number of schools that are perhaps new to chaplaincy or have a new chaplain where that process could take somewhat longer.

The delay also means chaplains who were employed last year haven’t been paid in the last few weeks. Most chaplains had accrued leave and so were covered until the end of January, but not beyond.

But Ruth says a number of proactive schools have stepped up and tried to cover the gap, with others even fundraising to extend chaplaincy at their school.

“We’ve had a number of schools here that have committed themselves to paying for additional hours so they can have the chaplain more days a week. So we’re really encouraged by the way the community supports chaplaincy in Tasmania.”

One of the consequences of a funding restructure has been that there is less money to go around. Ruth says Scripture Union is not aware on what basis schools were chosen to receive funding, but it’s left around 15 schools who had chaplains last year, without them in 2015.

“There’s a lot of schools which are grieving the loss of funding, but we’re helping them to understand that just because they don’t have government funding doesn’t mean they can’t have chaplaincy.”

89 out of 125 schools in Tasmania that applied received funding this year.