Indigenous Australia/INDA104/Indigenous Experiences of Education in a Western Education System

The Australian education system has historically had a very poor relationship with Indigenous Australians. As we saw in the previous Module, education was key to assimilation policies. Education has been used as a way to implement broader government and societal expectations about the place of Indigenous Australians within broader Australian society.

As we have learned throughout this session, at different times, policies have been implemented to exclude Indigenous children from education, offer them only a basic education which assumed that Indigenous children were of low intelligence or incapable of learning, or worked to train Indigenous people for specific economic roles in Australian society, such as domestic service or basic trades.

Indigenous people have often, however, also had difficult experiences in contemporary educational settings, which reflect western forms of knowledge and do not generally affirm the experiences and cultures of Indigenous students. This difficulty is reflected in the levels of educational attainment for Indigenous Australians measured in 2006:

Indigenous peoples aged 15 years and over were still half as likely as non-Indigenous Australians to have completed school to Year 12 in 2006 (23% compared with 49%). They were also twice as likely to have left school at Year 9 or below (34% compared with 16%). These relative differences have remained unchanged since 2001….

Although there have been continued improvements in the educational attainment of Indigenous Australians in recent years, levels of attainment remain below those of non-Indigenous Australians. Non-Indigenous people were twice as likely as Indigenous peoples to have a non-school qualification in 2006 (53% compared with 26%). Non-Indigenous people were more than four times as likely to have a Bachelor Degree or above (21% compared with 5%) and twice as likely to have an Advanced Diploma or Diploma (9% compared with 4%) (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2008).

Although equity in educational participation and attainment has still not been reached, there have been some recent improvements. Figures from the 2011 Census show that:
 * 56% of 3 to 5 year old Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children attended pre-school or primary school, up from 53% in the 2006 Census
 * 61% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 15 to 17 years were attending secondary school, up from 53% in 2006
 * more than one in three (37%) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 15 years and over had attained Year 12 or equivalent and/or Certificate II or higher qualification, up from 30% in 2006.

Still, only one-quarter (25%) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 15 years and over reported Year 12 or equivalent as the highest year of school completed, compared with about half (52%) of non-Indigenous people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012).