Northern Territory’s education policy hands remote Indigenous students an impossible dilemma
Trent is from a community of 400 people in the Top End. Arrive by road and the first thing you see is the red dust air strip, but closer to home, great spreading trees create oases of cool in the tropical heat. Under them, ceremonies are planned, card games played, yarns shared.
Trent didn’t leave his community because he wanted to. On the contrary. He went to boarding school because he, his mum and his nana value education and because he had no alternative. After a year, the Indigenous student coordinator at his school 4,000kms to the south described him as acutely homesick.
Trent could be from any one of 78 communities in the Northern Territory where young people face the same dilemma. Since 2015, sending teenagers away to board has been the official policy position of the Territory government. The NT’s Indigenous education strategy 2015-2024 stipulates that if children want access to a high school program, it will need to be away from home. Those who elect to remain close to country, kin, language and culture during their teenage years will have access to rudimentary “post primary literacy and numeracy”, but not to a secondary curriculum. The policy was launched with a schedule of promised evaluations, but six years in, none have been made publicly available.
Despite parliamentary and other inquiries exposing the complexity of Indigenous boarding programs and calling for greater transparency, reliable data remains near impossible to access.
In 2019, a study was conducted in Trent’s community by researchers at the Australian National University. It is the only in-depth investigation of the NT’s Indigenous education strategy.
Over a 10-year period, this community’s 100 young people had been sent to 38 different schools in towns and cities all over Australia. 90% dropped out, more than half in their first year. In 2019, 22 of 80 secondary aged kids were enrolled in 10 boarding schools spanning five states. For the 58 who elected to remain at home, their only option was to attend the local primary school, but that school only received funding for 11 students, which begs the question of what investment was being made in the other 47.
None, as it turns out.
Indigenous boarding programs attract significant media attention. Typically, articles celebrating a young person’s enrolment or completion of school are accompanied by photos featuring smiling faces and crisp new uniforms. Narratives of courage, hope and opportunity. We all want Indigenous students to flourish in education, and it is right and proper to acknowledge individuals’ efforts and achievements. But support for the Indigenous boarding industry cannot come at the cost of the invisible majority of children in remote Australia in whom no investment is currently being made.
Our respective research projects reveal how complex the experiences of First Nations boarders are, and this is borne out in Trent’s community. Some young people had tried two, three and even four new schools, but none had lasted a full year in their subsequent school. When Covid-19 hit, all boarders came home. Border closures and different state and territory regulations made the operation a logistical nightmare.
Six of the 22 returning boarders presented at the local primary school gates. They were welcomed in, provided with breakfast and lunch, included in school activities and supervised in their learning. This strained staff and a system already woefully under-resourced. The six came with a range of learning profiles but with no funding or resource allocation to ensure their needs were met.
Similar stories are emerging from across Australia. We know of one young woman attending a boarding school in Melbourne when the pandemic hit. She returned home to her Aboriginal community in far north Queensland. The local shire website notes her town has chronically low internet speeds and black spots. Her family has no computer or iPad and she is struggling to complete year 11 on her mother’s prepaid mobile phone. This has eaten into data allowance which the family relies on to complete all banking and Centrelink transactions, to connect with social services and, most importantly, to communicate with family. Here too, there is no high school, and the local primary school, already struggling with high staff turnover and low internet reliability, has had to pick up the slack with no additional funds to help.
In the 2021-22 budget, the federal government announced that $16.6m would be spent to assist boarding schools with high numbers of Indigenous boarders to remain financially sustainable during recovery from the Covid pandemic. Propping up the Indigenous boarding industry is one thing. Ensuring the money is spent where it is really needed is another.
Covid has not created an education crisis in remote Australia. It has exposed one. Some visitors to remote communities laugh when they see little kids running around in discarded private school hats, shirts, bags. These are artefacts of a broken system that fails to serve remote community needs.
Far too often, boarding schools are no more than a revolving door: community students enter, are chewed up and spat out, rapid fire, with no alternative to pick them up. The vast majority lose faith with the education system and never return to school. Support for the Indigenous boarding industry cannot come at the cost of silencing their stories.
The pandemic has exposed the real cost of failing to develop place-based and culturally responsive education in remote Australia.
The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) provides that states shall provide the means for Indigenous peoples, particularly children, to access education which supports their culture and language. The federal government adopted the declaration in 2008. How will our nation now seek to honour it?
• Dr Marnie O’Bryan is a research fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University and co-chair of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. Her book Boarding and Australia’s First Nations: Understanding how residential schooling shapes lives will be released by Springer later this year.
• Dr Jessa Rogers is a proud Wiradjuri educator, consultant, researcher and board director. Her PhD Boarding School Business: The Voices of Aboriginal Girls Attending Boarding Schoolsfocused on the experience of Aboriginal students in boarding schools in Australia and New Zealand. Jessa is the First Nations Senior Research Fellow at QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre and managing director of Baayi Consulting.
• Wayne Quilliam is adjunct professor at the school of media and communications at RMIT University, and one of Australia’s pre-eminent Indigenous photographic artists. He was part of the research team investigating the impact of the NT’s Indigenous Education Policy 2015-2024. His book, Culture is Life, is a modern, photographic celebration of the diversity of Indigenous Australians.