Record number of Indigenous students graduate but education gap remains

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

Australian education's racist past is not ancient history for teacher and proud Gamilaroi woman Jenadel Lane, but part of living memory and family lore.
"My mum who is alive still today, she always tells the story of the darker you were, the further down the back of the classroom you were," said Ms Lane, the Deputy Principal at Dubbo College Senior Campus.
Today, Ms Lane is at the heart of writing a more inclusive chapter in Australian education.
Her work was instrumental to Dubbo College having the highest number of Indigenous students graduate Year 12 last year.
Figures supplied exclusively to ABC News by the NSW Education Department show these students were part of a record number of 1,934 students statewide to graduate.
"We had the most Koori kids that completed Year 12, we had a few Koori kids that actually received high marks in their HSC. And we're hoping that that'll be bigger next year," Ms Lane said.
"We still have kids that are coming through that are the first to graduate in their families. That's uplifting."
Last year's graduating class included Ms Lane's daughter, Retori Lane, who is this year studying to become a teacher.
"Some people, especially Indigenous kids, they have a really low self-esteem and don't really understand what they can do."
Jenadel Lane puts her school's success down to a strong team that fosters cultural connections, pride and a sense of belonging, partnering each Indigenous student with a mentor.
The school also has cultural captains, leaders in the student body like Selwyn Kelly who can inspire other students.
One of 10 children, Selwyn has overcome challenges most teenagers can't imagine.
For the last five years he's lived in an Aboriginal hostel in Dubbo almost 400 kilometres away from his family in Bourke. And that's left him feeling a loss of connection to family and culture.
"Going back on Country it means a lot to me," Selwyn said.
Selwyn has come to love school, which he said turned him from an introvert to a confident, outgoing young man.
"It makes me feel proud of who I am and where I come from and my role as a leader at the school. I'm feeling really good about that because I'll be the second person in my family to graduate Year 12," he said.
He hopes to pursue a teaching degree at university next year.
This year's female cultural captain, Kolorah Newman, is also blazing a trail and hopes to become a police woman when she finishes school this year.
"I want to go into the police force to help Aboriginals within the community with law. Obviously a lot of people haven't been treated right. I want to change that," she said.
In parts of Australia there has been a backlash to Welcome to Country and Acknowledge of Country which Dubbo College prioritises.
But Jenadel Lane points again to recent history to demonstrate why there is a need to foster a sense of inclusion for Indigenous students.
Ms Lane was inspired to be a teacher by her grandmother Delma Trindall, a non-Indigenous woman who met and married her grandfather.
She said the family lived in fear of welfare authorities at a time when authorities opposed these unions.
"My dad tells the story of why his parents were droving so much when he was a child and it was to keep them all together, because the welfare was after him and his siblings," Ms Lane said.
That promise she made to her grandmother Delma, known as Delly, inspired her through her own challenges with racism.
"I think that's why Aboriginal people do what we do in education, in any institution for that matter, it's to re-build that trust," Ms Lane said.
It was just one of many stories of exclusion.
Professor Melitta Hogarth from the University of Melbourne also knows its sting.
She was born in New South Wales in 1974, just two years after the end of a policy called exclusion on demand.
The policy began in 1902 and could see Indigenous children kicked out of school if a single parent complained.
"Parents were able to put in complaints to principals to say the health and wellbeing of their own children were under duress because of Aboriginal children being in class and hence exclusion on demand," Professor Hogarth said.
She said it was just one of many policies across Australia that excluded Indigenous people with impacts still being felt today.
"What that does is it means the schooling system is seen as not for us and it's carried on through an intergenerational understanding that education is a place we're going to struggle," she said.
Over decades governments have worked hard to overcome this history but system-wide success in schools remains elusive despite investments in the billions.
The Indigenous Advancement Strategy announced in 2020 by the Commonwealth government allocated $1.24 billion for children and schooling over three years.
Last year, the federal government announced a further $110 million spend over four years to accelerate closing the education gap.
On top of that, state governments often have their own annual initiatives in the tens of millions.
Despite these investments most statistics still show a large achievement gap which Professor Hogarth said had implications later in life.
"What it means is these kids are going to have trouble going beyond Year 10. Quite often we see that the transition into senior secondary is not as high for Indigenous students," Professor Hogarth said.
"It limits the kinds of futures they can imagine for themselves."
She said Indigenous people needed to be more involved in solutions.
Catherine Liddle, the CEO of SNAICC, a national voice for Indigenous children, said the achievement gap started young.
"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are nearly twice as likely as non-Indigenous children to fall behind in developmental milestones before starting school," Ms Liddle said.
"We know that when our children start school behind, it's harder for them — and for their teachers — to catch up. That shows up in results like NAPLAN, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are failing at four times the rate of their non-Indigenous classmates."
Ms Liddle said in remote areas as many as 90 per cent of Indigenous students weren't meeting literacy and numeracy benchmarks.
She welcomed new government initiatives in early childhood education with one caveat.
"We need genuine partnerships with Aboriginal community-controlled organisations (ACCOs) to deliver early education services that are culturally strong, locally driven, and proven to work," she said.
Back on the ground at Dubbo College Senior Campus, Jenadel Lane agrees it's the secret sauce for writing a different history.
"Definitely recommend having someone who's a go-to for every kid. Every Koori kid, they need a person that they can go to, either a mentor or for academics and wellbeing, but they need a go-to that can manage, support, motivate, inspire and push," she said.