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Although the inquiry has uncovered shocking evidence during public hearings that the Victorian Education Department knowingly shuffled paedophile teachers around the state and endangered children, its scope was limited to a cluster of pedophiles who taught at Beaumaris Primary School in Melbourne’s bayside south-east.

Survivors, advocates and lawyers have claimed the inquiry was only ever going to scratch the surface of a statewide crisis that was at its worst between the 1960s and 1990s.

Beaumaris Primary, whose beachside location and close-knit community were attractive to young parents in the post-war decades, was the focus of the inquiry due to the startling amount of sexual abuse that occurred there in the 60s and 70s.

In the early 70s, four prolific offenders overlapped at the school.

But in lengthy careers with the Victorian Education Department, those teachers were also shuffled elsewhere, teaching at a combined 24 Victorian government schools between the 50s and 90s.

The oldest of the offenders was Grahame Steele, a tall and imposing former footy star who is accused of sexually abusing boys for decades on school grounds and at a holiday house in Inverloch, south-east of Melbourne.

Despite the attempts of a survivor to have Steele charged by police while he was still working in a school as a principal, his government school career spanned from 1952 to 1990 and he was never prosecuted before dying in 2013.

Evidence presented at the inquiry suggests Steele continued offending in the period after he was reported to police.

In November last year, the most infamous of the Beaumaris offenders, Darrell Ray, died while facing dozens of new charges.

Ray was the librarian and sports coach at Beaumaris Primary.

In the 60s and 70s, Ray rampantly abused boys at four state schools and in the St Kilda Football Club’s little league team, which he coached for 11 years.

In 1979 and 2001, Ray was convicted of a combined total of 33 offences against 21 boys.

But the ABC’s investigations and civil lawsuits against the Victorian Education Department have revealed that he likely abused many more.

Ray’s brother-in-law, Gary Mitchell, sexually abused boys at government schools for his entire 31-year teaching career and beyond — despite credible complaints by students and their parents in the early 70s. Between 1971 and 1973, he abused numerous students at Beaumaris Primary.

MacGregor sexually abused children for three decades before he faced criminal charges in 1985.

But even once MacGregor was convicted of child sex crimes, the Victorian Education Department not only kept him on as an employee but granted him further teaching positions.

Despite the sheer scale of abuse revealed in the cases of Reynolds, Morris and Gossage, none has been canvassed at the Beaumaris Inquiry.

In 1980, the Victorian Education Department sent Reynolds to a psychologist who deemed him incapable of controlling his urges to sexually abuse children, but it sent him straight back into classrooms.

In 1988, a student uprising at Beechworth Primary also failed to have him removed. Only in 1993, as a criminal investigation gathered pace, was he finally forced to retire.

Much like Reynolds in the same period, Morris rarely attempted to disguise his criminal behaviour, wandering around classrooms with an erection and rubbing his penis on boys in his primary school classes.

In the same period of the 70s, Englishman Gossage arrived in Australia and received his first Victorian Education Department posting. Gossage was a known sexual abuser of the girls he taught from that very first appointment at Bairnsdale West Primary. The response of the department’s district school inspectors was to simply shuffle Gossage from school to school as the reports came in.