A program designed to improve attendance in remote schools achieved worse outcomes than elsewhere, was ethically problematic and potentially harmed those it aimed to help, Indigenous children.
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While it sounds like a plot line from ABC satire Utopia, these were some of the damning findings of a study into the federal Remote Schools Attendance Strategy, published in the Australian Journal of Indigenous Education.
The 2013 initiative was launched by then prime minister Tony Abbott and Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion.
They hoped employing local people as school attendance officers - called 'yellow shirts' in remote communities because of their uniform - would support parents to get their children to school and consequently improve educational outcomes.
In an interview on ABC's 730 on Thursday, Mr Abbott detailed his reasons for campaigning against an Indigenous voice in the referendum, which will be held later this year. They included his mantra from when he was the self-styled 'prime minister for Indigenous affairs'.
"We've gotta get Aboriginal kids to school, of course we've gotta get Aboriginal adults into work, of course, and we've gotta keep Indigenous communities safe," he told the national broadcaster, having said similar things during his prime ministership.
According to the analysis of the attendance strategy by academics John Guenther, Samuel Osborne, Stephen Corrie, Lester-Irabinna Rigney and Kevin Lowe, it was doomed to from the start, and stands as an illustration of how not to develop programs for Indigenous communities.
The group found that after a small initial rise, average attendance at participating schools declined post-2016 and are now more than eight percentage points lower than when the program began.
An adjunct associate professor with Flinders University, Guenther is also research leader for education and training at Darwin's Batchelor Institute. He says evidence from the government's own My School website showed early on that the program wasn't working.
"And what was even more disturbing was that instead of being a benefit to schools and communities it became something that was actually somewhat harmful," he says.
"In other words, it had a negative impact on attendance, and therefore restricted educational opportunities compared to schools that received no intervention."
Associate Professor Lowe, a Gubbi Gubbi man from southeast Queensland and Scientia Indigenous Fellow at UNSW, is working on a community and school focused research project on developing a model of sustainable improvement in Aboriginal education.
"We need really strong support programs for beginner teachers in small towns - in particular, making sure they are introduced to community members and make connections, rather than feeling isolated," he says.
"We also need to provide appropriate pedagogical training that supports them to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
"They need to understand how students are living and their parents' aspirations for them and they need to build those relationships first."
The 2013 attendance startegy was rolled out to 44 schools in term 1 the following year, and to another 33 in term 2.
A third stage followed in 2015 and the program now involves schools in 84 communities.
Dr Osborne has worked in Aboriginal education since 1995, including as principal at Ernabella Anangu School in remote northwestern South Australia. He also co-ordinates the UniSA's Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara language and culture programs.
"The assumption is that once you get more bums on seats, then you fix performance, ie NAPLAN," he says.
"But of course that doesn't take into account the quality of education or student engagement or even whether little Johnnie is awake.
"And the sort of simplistic assumption here is that once you close the gap in attendance, then everyone will finish school because they're all performing in improved ways, so that will make them employable.
"So the kids will go to school, the adults will go to work, we've just 'solved' it and what we have to do is fix attendance, and then everything else takes care of itself."
Such simplistic assumption, he says, is obviously flawed.
However one way to actually increase community and student engagement in remote communities is to appreciate the value of Aboriginal languages.
"There's no longer really an accreditation framework for a first language remote speaker to become a teacher," he says.
"That's a great loss and another harm that been done in the last decade to remote education, the dismantling and disinvestment in terms of workforce development for local Aboriginal educators."
Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney on Wednesday used remote schools as an example of how a First Nations voice would work.
"The community identifies that this is a challenge and wants explore local solutions to improve school attendance," she said.
"So the community approaches their representative on the voice and raises this issue with them.
"The voice then has the power to make representations on how to improve school attendance in that local community to government and the parliament.
"It's about linking up that local decision-making and local knowledge with policy-makers in government."
Investment in the Remote Schools Attendance Strategy included $46.5 million over 2014-15, another $81.5 million to 2018 and an additional $78.4 million to extend it until 2021 - a total of $206.4 million over eight years.
Prof Guenther says the research shows the way to improve education for remote students is to ditch the paternalistic top-down approach, direct investment into training remote Aboriginal community members as teachers and ask communities what works for them.
"Attendance is a pretty poor proxy for anything," he says.
"You can get kids to go to school but it doesn't tell you whether their outcomes have improved, whether they're engaged in learning or what kind of learning that they're engaged with.
"If the voice is used properly, then it should help develop policy in ways that will give an evidence-based and community-based Indigenous response to the issues involved rather than a political response.
"I suspect the voice would actually offer an alternative way of looking at the problem and actually reframe the problem in a way that suits communities."
Australian Associated Press
