(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)
Truancy officers have started work in West Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, as part of a federal government push to increase school attendance in Indigenous communities.
With attendance rates as low as 50 percent in some regions, there's broad community support for something to be done.
But many have been critical of the new program, seeing its focus as too limited, and failing to address systematic shortcomings facing remote area schools.
Richard Parkin reports.
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Eleven new school attendance officers are already on the streets of Gunbalanya - a community around 300 kilometres east of Darwin.
The Gunbalanya school, of just over 300 students, is the first of 42 remote area schools covered by a new $28-million program targetting truancy.
It operates on a different term timetable than most of the country, because of the monsoon season.
Even on the first day of the program, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion was already claiming success, with a huge leap in attendance.
"We've just simply never had that response in Gunbalanya before, full stop. So quite clearly, the community, as we suspected, have the answer. So I think it's a lesson to everyone in this area of policy; that you've got to rely more, and have the community completely involved if you want to have a real change on the ground."
Peter Clisby from the Northern Territory branch of the Australian Education Union agrees that the initial community response has been impressive.
But he isn't convinced that it's solely due to the presence of the truancy officers.
Peter Clisby thinks the community is worried about a Territory government policy to link school staffing levels to attendance figures.
"Unlike most systems ours is very heavily influenced by attendance rates, in terms of your staffing allocations. So Gunbalanya was scheduled to lose 1.87 staff this year. Now we think they may have lost more than that. We think there may be three fewer teachers there."
Peter Buckskin from the University of South Australia has additional concerns.
He's worried that the 400 new truancy officers - often unemployed people from within the communities - haven't been equipped with the skill-sets necessary to perform the role.
"The workforce where you need to gather some of these truancy officers might be as challenged as the people they would like to help; who I would think would need lots of training to do this difficult work of couselling parents and care givers about the importance of school, rather than just knocking on the door thinking that physically taking a child to the school gate is going to engender better educational outcomes."
Peter Clisby from the Australian Education Union says it supports additional funding to target truancy,
But he says any progress made in raising attendance rates will be undermined by the Territory government's funding cutbacks in other parts of the school system.
"What we need is for everyone to be pulling in the same direction. Unfortunately what we've got at the moment is Minister Scullion putting in place truancy officers - we certainly hope that it's a successful program, but what we also know is that we've got our Northern Territory government slashing teaching numbers, classroom teaching numbers across the territory, particularly impacting on Indigenous schools."
The federal government says the national rollout of the new program, including training of truancy officers, should be completed by the end of January.
