Earlier this year, Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion attracted national media coverage on his visits to remote Top End Aboriginal communities, where he urged new local truancy officers clad in bright yellow T-shirts and bearing loudhailers to “get the kids to school”. But after an initial spike in attendance at bush schools – often from an alarmingly low base – our more recent analysis suggests that little lasting improvement has been achieved.
Our research shows a huge gap in Indigenous and non-Indigenous school attendance in the Northern Territory remains. However, we have also uncovered some of the reasons for that poor attendance, which could make a real difference to seeing more Indigenous kids in school and getting the education they need for a better future.
Why turning up at school matters
An attendance rate of 80% is generally considered to be the absolute minimum for a student to be able to keep up in their school learning.
A recent Menzies School of Health Research study analysed the school attendance records of about 6,500 children born in the Northern Territory between 1994 and 2004. It found that two-thirds (66%) of the Indigenous students in the sample attended school less than 80% of the school days over their school career. In contrast, just 5% of non-Indigenous students fell below the touchstone 80% attendance level.
(Menzies Health, CC BY-NC-ND)
Getting a good education, and doing well at school in a broader social sense, is widely acknowledged as providing the foundation for a healthy and prosperous future. Employers cannot realistically offer work to applicants who lack basic levels of literacy and numeracy.
The disturbing findings from our analysis underline the fact that closing the gap in literacy and numeracy will require much more effective measures to improve school attendance.
Sadly, the school experience of too many Aboriginal children in the NT seems unlikely to offer a path to a better future. The 2013 NAPLAN results show that 18% of year 3 Indigenous children in Australia had reading scores below the national minimum standard. In the NT this figure is dramatically higher – almost half (49%) of Indigenous students are falling below this standard.
These children have little chance of making good progress in their school education. They are very likely to leave school early, without the functional literacy they need to secure and hold a job. Governments, Indigenous communities and society generally simply cannot afford a continuing failure of education of this magnitude.
So Senator Scullion is right to focus public attention on these devastating figures, given the gravity of the consequences of such low school attendance.
But are truancy officers the right solution?
Tackling the causes of truancy
On the face of it, the federal government’s allocation of A$16 million for an army of school attendance officers and its imposition of an income-management regime on families who fail to send their children to school make sense.
However, many complex contributing factors to do with life in remote Australia create the preconditions for low school attendance. While families must take responsibility for ensuring their children attend school, it should also be acknowledged that underlying community issues such as inadequate housing and health care, and inter-generational unemployment, are affecting their capacity to exercise this responsibility.
School attendance is a particularly thorny issue. Efforts to address one aspect of the problem all too easily reveal previously hidden concerns or create new obstacles.
If we want to find a scapegoat for the disappointing progress in improving Indigenous education outcomes, then it’s easy to focus on the performance of bush schools. But the problems of remote Australia are complex and the solutions need to be nuanced.
The truth is, schools can’t be expected do it all on their own. In fact, having looked at this problem closely, our Centre for Child Development and Education has concluded that one of the crucial solutions to this problem lies not at school, but at home.
The connections between housing and school
We combined publicly available Australian Bureau of Statistics community data with schools data from the MySchool website on school attendance in remote Northern Territory, Western Australian and Queensland locations. Eight community factors – including average adult weekly income, education level, language spoken at home and remoteness – were identified as being separately correlated with attendance.
Remarkably, when we examined how these factors operated in combination, almost half of the explained variation in attendance was accounted for by a single measure: housing over-crowding, which is the average number of people per available bedroom in the community.
The average number of people per bedroom in these communities ranged from one to almost four. For each extra person per bedroom, there was a 20% reduction in the rate of school attendance.
There are compelling reasons for tackling housing overcrowding as an immediate health issue. However, the strength of this link between housing and school attendance suggests that reducing the shortage of adequate housing may be another important way to enable families to better support their children’s school attendance and learning.
Sven Silburn receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council, The Ian Potter Foundation, The Sidney Myer Fund & the Northern Territory departments of Health, Education, and Families and Children.
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