Elizabeth* was 13 years old when she went away to school. The scholarship people said they’d provide the funds, but the family had to find the school. Skin in the game, they said; that’s what’s required for Aboriginal kids to make it at boarding school. Skin in the game.
In the 2015 calendar year there were 5,700 First Australian students in boarding. Of those, 1,200 were supported by scholarships to attend high-fee-paying schools like the one Elizabeth attended through the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation, or AIEF.
Programs like that don’t come cheap: hundreds of millions of dollars go into this endeavour.
AIEF alone has amassed $164m, of which $83m is from the federal government and the rest from philanthropic donations. Everyone wants a good news story in Indigenous education, and this is as good as it gets. AIEF advertises that 94% of their students complete Year 12 and transition to higher education.
Elizabeth had always been a good student – As and Bs right through primary school in regional Queensland. She had a strong cultural education too. Her dad had been raised to move between two worlds and he was determined that his kids would also grow up understanding their heritage.
Mum, with her Maori background, was equally committed to language and culture. At the same time, both appreciated the benefits of education in the modern world, and believed that a western education is essential to a productive adult life.
By the beginning of Year 8, the family decided that boarding school would provide Elizabeth with the best educational opportunities. Her mum swung into action, contacting schools, filling in application forms, liaising with the AIEF who promised a scholarship. There was a cousin at a school in Sydney and when a place unexpectedly became available, they jumped at it. They sent copies of Naplan results, flew down for an interview and purchased uniform and books, all of which put considerable strain on the family finances.
Elizabeth knew what she wanted out of school. She had been to a careers expo where the Australian defence force had a stall. Her mum told me, “The air force took her eye. She just got this thing about wanting to get into the air force. One of the things you need for that is to do really well in maths.” Once she’d secured a spot in a “top school”, the family assumed that Elizabeth was all the more likely to achieve her dream.
Elizabeth found boarding school hard. Really hard. Having always been confident at school, she now found herself lost at sea. Her marks plummeted and she felt socially isolated. When she sought out her cousin, sneaking into her room at night to sleep on the floor, Elizabeth was reprimanded. Extra academic supports were put in place, but the family wondered how effective they really were. The maths teacher reported that she was trying “extremely hard” but that Elizabeth had attained an “E”. You can’t do worse than that. Her mum questioned whether an E for maths from a private school would get her further than an A or a B from the school in a country town.
She contacted AIEF to see if they could organise a mentor, but was told the mentoring program was only available for students in Years 10 to 12. Other external supports were similarly off limits: AIEF partner schools are contractually prevented from accessing services offered through organisations like AIME or the Aspiration Initiative which do important work with Indigenous students in other schools. Elizabeth had no adult role model to offer cultural support or help her contextualise her experience in an affluent, Anglo-Australian school. The few other First Australian boarders in the school became her only peer group, but even that was not encouraged.
When Elizabeth returned home for the holidays, she was adamant that she didn’t want to go back to school, but that was not an option. Her mum explained: “She was just so unhappy, but they said to her, if you don’t go, then your mum’s going to have to pay thousands of dollars because you signed a form that you’ll be here for a year and you’ve committed to a year, and you’ll have to pay us [something like] $50,000.”
Feeling trapped and lonely, Elizabeth became increasingly oppositional and self-destructive.Elizabeth was caught smoking in the toilet and had an alcoholic drink in a friend’s room. We probably only had a sip, she told me, “but that was enough”. Rather than recognising her behaviour as a reaction to issues over which she felt she had no control, the school treated Elizabeth as a problem student. She was first suspended and then expelled.
Currently there are no studies tracking the outcomes of First Australian students who drop out of boarding, but anecdotal evidence is that most do not re-engage with school when they return home. That means if a young person leaves home in Year 7 or 8, and like Elizabeth spends less than a year at boarding school, there is a serious risk that might be the last they see of the secondary education system.
In my study of the experience of First Australian students in boarding schools, Elizabeth was not the only person to describe being suspended or expelled; others also reported being punished for behaviours that they claimed were the outworking of emotional stress that they had no other way of expressing.
Elizabeth is one of 17 girls to have been supported by an AIEF scholarship at her school between 2008-2017. She is one of 10 to have discontinued before the end of Year 12, but you won’t find her represented in AIEF statistics. All AIEF scholarships are paid retrospectively. In his submission to the House of Representatives inquiry into educational opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, AIEF founder and CEO Andrew Penfold wrote: “Funding should be clearly linked to program outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. There should be a transition to a 100% success-based retrospective funding model in this sector where government simply pays an agreed sum when an outcome is achieved and otherwise it pays nothing, it would quickly limit wastage of government funds.”
As well as “limiting the wastage of funds’”, the retrospective funding model is justified on the basis that exposure to financial loss means that parents and schools have “skin in the game”. It is also convenient from an accounting statistical point of view. It means that students, like Elizabeth, who drop out during their first year are not treated as AIEF students unless and until they “succeed”. Either they appear as a credit on the AIEF ledger, or they do not appear at all.
The lack of transparency described here creates a distorted perception of how high-performing boarding schools work – or do not work – for First Australian students. By making claims about completion rates, investment, by both government and the private sector, is deflected away from community-based or culturally grounded education programs.
Starved of investment, these will inevitably wither and die.
Having choice in education is a right Australians hold dear. Scholarships such as those provided by AIEF, Yalari, the Smith Family and others mean that high-performing, high-fee-paying schools become a realistic option for First Australian families. For many young people, they create opportunities that are life-changing in all the right ways. Where families do have choice however (more than 60% of those living in remote areas do not), claims about the outcomes they should expect which are at best misleading, at worst, deceptive, contribute to them making ill-informed education decisions for their children.
When things go wrong, as they did for Elizabeth, young people are left feeling they were one of a tiny minority not to succeed, and that there must be something not quite right with them. Extravagant claims do nothing to encourage rigorous and independent evaluation of scholarship programs. They lead schools to assume that a business-as-usual approach to working with First Australian young people is acceptable. If 94% of students “succeed”, why would they need to do anything else?
We are consistently told that education “in the bush” is too hard or too expensive to deliver, but the cost of funding a boarding place is two to three times higher than the recurrent funding a remote school receives from the federal government.
Elizabeth’s experience calls into question what happens once a young person arrives at boarding school. We know that there are highly competent and dedicated teachers who go over and above to support First Australian young people in some schools, but we are equally aware that that is not always the case. Teacher professional standards, which assume a degree of cultural competence, are not upheld by any national professional development program. How a First Australian young person is supported to thrive at school is hit and miss at the best. One young man remarked recently, “My Indigeneity is why they got me here, but now that I’m here I’m not allowed to be Aboriginal any more.”
* not her real name
Marnie O’Bryan is honorary research fellow in Indigenous education at the University of Melbourne.