New approach needed on attendance: Sarra

Aboriginal education expert Chris Sarra.

NATIONAL: Educators must not be disheartened by results showing Indigenous students continue to lag behind and their school attendance is dropping, an education expert says.

But a shift in thinking is needed to lift attendance rates.

A Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Reform Council report released on Thursday shows mixed results for indigenous students.

It says COAG targets to halve the gap in literacy and numeracy by 2018 are on track for Years 3, 5 and 7 but are at risk for Year 9 students.

Indigenous school attendance declined in Year 10 in all states and territories.

For Years 8 and 9 there were no improvements or falls in attendance.

Reform Council chair Paul McClintock said this was one of the most confronting pieces of data out of everything the council recorded.

“We hope the governments do see these results as an urgent warning because increasing indigenous school attendance rates is crucial to meeting their own targets,” he told journalists in Canberra.

“There’s not the slightest possibility of closing gaps in things like that if that number of children have opted out of the system.”

Chris Sarra, director of QUT’s Stronger Smarter Institute, said while the COAG report highlighted continuing concerns, at least it gave a measure of the state of Indigenous education.

To improve attendance rates, Dr Sarra said there needed to be a shift in thinking away from discussions about truancy to a more cooperative approach involving the whole community.

The approach of quarantining welfare payments if children didn’t attend school was “profoundly ineffective”.

“But we know for sure from examples right across the country, where school leaders go out of their way to engage with parents and children and build positive relationships, attendance improves,” he said.

Schools Minister Peter Garrett indicated the federal government was starting to think in this direction as well.

Dr Sarra warned educators not to be disheartened although many people had put in big efforts across Australia.

“If we can prove that we’re there for the long haul, relationships with Aboriginal communities will become much more positive and the results will start to flow much more quickly.”

AAP