If a senior teacher in a girls school chose to occasionally administer corporal punishment outside of school policy, she probably had no problem doing so. And as only a minority of Australian girls schools officially used corporal punishment as a sanction, this might well have been a fairly high proportion of all such incidents.
And then there were other cases – quite common until 1980 – where the school had no official policy at all on corporal punishment. I know of one girls school where it was widely believed there was no corporal punishment, on the basis it hadn’t been used in the memory of anybody in the school. It didn’t stop their Headmistress caning some girls in the mid 1970s when she decided that was what was called for – and there was no policy that said she couldn’t.