… when we are sick in
fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters
the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by
heavenly compulsion…
King Lear, Act one, Scene two.
Recent media articles have pointed to a continuing decline
in school attendance in remote primary schools and the secondary high schools
in the Kimberley. Yet this has been an issue for decades.
A 28 June 2017 ABC news article (link
here), headlined WA schools hardest hit by remote disadvantage,
nationwide study finds reported on a Curtin University study which found,
inter alia, that:
just 40 per cent of children
in disadvantaged areas [ of WA] were attending the benchmark 15 hours of
preschool per week, compared to almost 70 per cent nationally.
In July 2022, the ABC published an article (link
here) with the headline WA government accused of failing at-risk
Kimberley students over plans to address school truancy. The article stated
inter alia that the Kimberley is in crisis, and that:
A 2019 coronial inquest had
found poor school attendance to be a common factor in the deaths of the
children, who died between 2012 and 2016. Two of the deaths were in Halls
Creek, where truancy is chronic.
That article interviews a mother who complains about the
lack of follow up by the Department in relation to an attendance plan for her
son but fails to acknowledge or focus on the apparent incapacity of the parent
to ensure the son attends school. While mainstream Australia largely sees
parents as having an overarching responsibility for their adolescent children,
it is apparent that parents from traditional backgrounds do not share this
perspective. They consequently place the entire responsibility for ensuring
children attend whitefella schools onto governments.
A March 2023 article (link
here), headlined Kimberley student attendance drops again as 95 percent
of public schools record significant falls, flags the ongoing crisis. In a
box titled Key Points, the article states:
21 out of 22 public schools in
the Kimberley have seen a decline in attendance over the past two years. Some
schools' attendance rates have been below 50 per cent. Community leaders say
the Department of Education needs to do more to engage students.
While the governments have significant responsibilities,
not least because the range of likely causes go much wider than anything
parents can do, it does seem clear that community leaders must have a role in
finding solutions and shifting community views on the roles of parents.
A more recent article dated 6 September 2024 and headlined Fewer
than half of students in WA’s Kimberely attend secondary school (link
here). The key points box states:
In short: Newly-released
statistics show primary and secondary school attendance rates dropped
significantly in the Kimberley for 2023. Secondary school attendance was 41.6
per cent, while primary school attendance was 62 per cent.
What's next? The
Kimberley region's education chief concedes school attendance is "an
ongoing challenge".
It seems clear that there is has been a long-standing
crisis in school attendance in remote communities in the Kimberely and WA, and
there is strong evidence that these issues also have traction on other remote
settings, including the NT and South Australia (link
here).
Having identified the attendance problem as one
particularly prevalent in remote settings, there is a need for caution insofar
as there is increasing evidence of an anxiety epidemic amongst young people
correlated strongly with the ubiquity of social media. A recent article in the
UK Guardian (link
here) addresses the issue of school attendance (without ascribing causes
beyond peer bullying) and argues against any policy moves to exercise punitive
measures on parents or children. The article cites the following official data
for a recent week of schooling across the UK (link
here):
The attendance rate
(proportion of possible sessions attended) was 89.8% across all schools in the
week commencing 15 July 2024. The absence rate was, therefore, 10.2% across all
schools…
… Across the academic year
2023/24, 20.7% of pupil enrolments missed 10% or more of their possible
sessions and are therefore identified as persistently absent.
This suggests that whatever the causes and contributors to
low remote community school attendance rates, there may also be much deeper systemic
issues in play with a global reach and impact. As an aside, the access to live
data in the UK is virtually unknown in Australian contexts. We shouldn’t think
that we always do better than the poms!
The consequences of limited education for individuals are
dire and include severely constrained life opportunities especially in more
modern and cross-cultural contexts, reduced lifetime earnings, and
predispositions to alcohol and drug abuse, and perhaps domestic violence and
criminal offending. While tragic for individuals, there are macro impacts on
the wider Aboriginal communities where school attendance issues are entrenched,
and broader impacts on communities affected by youth violence. These impacts are
beginning to seep into the larger towns and cities adjacent to remote Australia
and thus the consequences of poor school attendance are structurally and
systemically both economically significant and politically challenging for the
relevant state and territory governments.
These outcomes are not a surprise to me ( I have been
warning of the consequences of policy neglect across remote Australia since at
least 2007 when with Neil Westbury we published our book Beyond Humbug (link here). Those
warnings were largely not heeded by governments, and the result is that we now
confront a widespread and worsening catastrophe across remote Australia (link
here). Notwithstanding some welcome additional funding for remote housing
in the NT, the outstanding needs across remote Australia continue to outweigh
the efforts of governments (link
here). The appalling unemployment situation across remote Australia and the
Commonwealth Government’s entirely inadequate response raises for individuals the
unanswerable question: what is the point of an education if the future involves
a working lifetime spent on social security arising from the structurally
determined absence of employment opportunities -see the comments on CDP reform
in this recent post (link
here).
The policy vacuum in relation to remote Australia has
become endemic, deep-seated and is long-standing. The political implications
are clear: the recent NT election rout for the NT ALP, notwithstanding its
strong focus on law and order and advocacy of more punitive policies, are an
obvious outcome. Nothing proposed by either party in the NT would have or will come
close to addressing the deep systemic issues in play. In short, neither side of
politics in the NT is offering a solution. And yet, the Commonwealth too has vacated
the policy arena.
What is required?
I will keep this brief. In relation to remote attendance,
there is a need for the Commonwealth to step up and acknowledge it for the
national crisis it is. There will be a need first and foremost to acknowledge
the crisis and devise a robust and proactive strategy that goes well beyond the
local band-aids that have been the unthinking default approach to date (and yes
I am referring to the current Federal Government’s response to the Alice Springs
situation).
The Commonwealth should work with the states cooperatively
on these issues, but devise incentive-based payments to the states and
territories rather than indulging in the politically driven negotiation that
currently predominate. Robust support to Indigenous community leaders aimed at encouraging
and assisting them to raise expectations of parental involvement within their
communities are essential. But so too are getting financial resource
allocations for schools better targeted, and if necessary increased. Rewarding
effective teachers much better and ensuring that the curriculum is focussed on
the needs of the least capable cohort of students are both — to use a colloquial
expression — ‘no brainers’. This suggests that the adoption of curriculum
methodologies (such as Direct Learning) that do not allow any student to fall
behind must be a priority.
The bottom line is that there must be a quantum leap in the
levels of governmental concern and policy engagement. There may well be a case
too for a return to the use of proactive truancy officers designed to ensure no
child can avoid attending without a truancy officer engaging with the child and
his/her parental guardians though I am not advocating a punitive policy
approach.
Reforms to the education system alone in remote Australia
will neither be enough nor adequate. The structural drivers of low attendance
must also be addressed. While there may be some impact from the Commonwealth Government’s
proposed legislation to constrain access to social media for adolescents under
16, my intuition tells me that whatever its impact in mainstream contexts,
there will be a more muted impact in remote community contexts merely because of
the existence of other drivers of low attendance.
Those drivers include the poor state of housing, the low
levels of employment, and the all too ready access to cheap alcohol and drugs. It
follows that there must be a sustained increase in investment in remote housing
supply, and in adopting management approaches focussed on high quality housing
asset management.
And perhaps most importantly, the government must move
beyond its paltry commitment to reform of the CDP program, and substantially
expand the number of jobs it is fully funding across remote Australia. The
trick here will be to devise delivery models that focus on productive and
culturally informed employment: caring for country; devising ways to employ
community members as disability service providers in association with the NDIS
and state provided foundational supports; aged care employment; employment in
schools teaching languages, providing infrastructure support, and perhaps as teachers’
aides and ultimately local teachers. All these roles are real jobs often funded
by government, but there has been a lack of vision to ensure that they are
delivered through culturally informed organisational models.
Intuitively, an expansion of housing investment and
infrastructure across remote communities and of socially valuable employment
will have a constraining impact on anti-social behaviour such as drug and
alcohol abuse, which in turn are prime drivers of the sorts of behaviours that
lead to incarceration and community violence. Governments should also focus
attention on regulating and controlling the supply of drugs and alcohol in
remote communities and regional centres.
The experience of the last decade has been that neither the
ALP nor the LNP at a federal level have the political will nor the policy vision
to deliver on such an admittedly ambitious agenda. However, there is increasing
talk of a minority government scenario post the forthcoming election, and it
seems likely that whatever the outcome the Teals and Independents will have
greater influence. They are well placed to drive such a policy agenda if only
they have the vision and energy to take on what will inevitably be a
challenging, but nationally significant reform agenda.
The absence of any policy discussion regarding such an
agenda, and the absence of the agenda itself, reflect the lack of a national
vision amongst our political elites. They are also the source of ongoing
economic and social costs imposed directly on First Nations remote communities,
but inexorably leaking across to mainstream fiscal contexts. These social and financial
costs represent a substantial (and presently underappreciated) risk to our
aspirations to be a cohesive, inclusive and socially mature nation.
10 September 2024
