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Session E2: Education policy

1. Angela Leitch: Urban Issues in Indigenous Education Policy

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Abstract

The majority of Queensland’s Indigenous school students now live in urban settings with a high concentration residing near the State’s capital in South East Queensland. The movement to urban areas has presented challenges to the Queensland Department of Education and Training which has focused the majority of its Indigenous policy and attention on meeting the needs of Indigenous students in remote settings and identified community schools. With the continued changes in Indigenous demography and the Commonwealth’s agenda for all Indigenous students, Queensland has needed to re-think its Indigenous education policies to meet the needs of all Indigenous students. This paper will discuss the needs of urban Indigenous students as well as outlining the new direction Queensland is undertaking in Indigenous policy to meet the educational needs of all Indigenous students.

Author bio:

Angela Leitch is a Woppaburra woman from the Keppel Islands off the central coast of Queensland. She is currently the Director of Indigenous Education Policy in the Queensland Department of Education and Training. Angela has worked in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs for the past 20 years mainly in the areas of employment, child protection and education. During 2007 and 2008 she was involved in a project where the Queensland Department of Education and Training examined the needs of urban Indigenous students in South East Queensland.

2. Jerry Schwab: Targets, indicators, gaps and outcomes: Indigenous education policy and the confusion of education and schooling

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Abstract

Indigenous education outcomes in urban centres are often ignored as media and political attention is focused on the more dramatically unsettling ‘education gaps’ found in remote Australia. Yet data show that significant numbers of Indigenous young people in the cities struggle with education. Drawing on some standard indicators of educational engagement and outcomes, this paper sketches a portrait of Indigenous young people living in major cities today. In particular, it focuses on the surprising number of early school leavers, a group who are at worst variously demonised and stigmatised as failures or at best labelled as ‘at risk’ and in need of rescue. The paper explores various important education policy questions: What is success? What is failure? What is being measured? What are these young people ‘at risk’ of? And most importantly, what is education?

Author bio:

R.G. (Jerry) Schwab is a Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. He is one of a very small number of anthropologists in Australia with research experience in the area of Indigenous education and training. He has been involved with educational research and development in both Australia and overseas (USA, Canada, United Arab Emirates and Egypt) since the mid-1980s. Since joining CAEPR in 1995, he has carried out primary and secondary research on issues as diverse as Aboriginal community-controlled schools, notions of educational 'failure' and 'success' among Indigenous students, Indigenous workforce development and Indigenous education outcomes at the primary, secondary and post-compulsory levels. He has long standing research interests in Indigenous school retention, the relationship between schools and communities and literacy. A focus of his current research is on the educational and social re-engagement of Indigenous youth.