Child protection advocate Hetty Johnston says she is "totally horrified" over the news of a system failure that caused more than 600 suspected cases of child abuse reports by Queensland school principals to be lost.

The system failure, discovered on Thursday, resulted in hundreds of cases of abuse reported by school principals across the state not being forwarded to police.

Ms Johnston, CEO of child protection group Bravehearts, said the failure was a bungling of "enormous proportions".

"There are 640 children for whom every minute counts, every hour counts," she said.

"There is nothing more important than the safety and protection of our children and that it just wasn't checked is just demonstrative probably of the level of importance that was placed on this."

She said she hoped no children were harmed as a result of the failure.

"That wouldn't be something I'd want to live with for the rest of my life," Ms Johnston said.

She said it was a positive thing that principals were reporting the cases and that Education Minister Kate Jones notified the public when she found out.

Ms Jones previously announced the launching of internal and external reviews and that a manager and a contractor who worked on the system have been stood aside.

The Education Minister also said the abuse was not passed on to police due to a coding failure in the new child protection IT system, which began in January.

"Clearly there were not enough checks and balances at the time to ensure the changes made in January were working," Ms Jones said.

Police are continuing to review the unreported cases to check if the children were safe, but it remains unclear whether any have suffered further abuse as a result of the delayed notification.

Ms Johnston has commended the swift response by police.

"Police of course worked through the night to make sure they could do as much as they could to get on top of all of this," she said.

"But it's not good, by any stretch of the imagination. This is just horrific. We have got 640 kids there who are just left hanging in the wind.

"But now what we have to do is react responsibly; I mean these little ad hoc computer systems that are going on around the country are not the solution.

"We need to get smarter, we need to prioritise our children and get this right.

"Because every complaint is just part of the picture of a child and it's all in little silos all over the place."