Indigenous students targeted with $20m fund boost

ELEANOR HALL: It's a scheme that until now has been operating only on a very small scale but more Indigenous students will soon be given the opportunity to get a top education at boarding schools in the big cities.

The Prime Minister has announced a grant of $20-million to help about 2,000 children attend boarding schools and the Government is encouraging business leaders to join the project and fund even more places.

Simon Santow has our report.

SIMON SANTOW: St Vincent's College in inner city Sydney is a long way away from the birth places of some of the Indigenous students it's been helping quietly in recent years. The Catholic school caters for both day girls as well as boarders from the country.

MICHELLE HUGONNET: I suppose we believe that from a social justice perspective these girls can't wait til things are right for them in their home towns.

SIMON SANTOW: Michelle Hugonnet is the Principal at St Vincent's.

MICHELLE HUGONNET: The early signs for us at St Vincent's are that the Indigenous students settle very happily into the current culture I suppose of our school. The students find that the teachers are very welcoming of adapting the way they teach to the needs, the learning needs of the Indigenous girls. And the residential component, the boarding component of our school, or the staff in the boarding house are also extremely welcoming of the girls as are the families of St Vincent's students.

So it's a very welcoming environment in the school and it has a staff, including myself, that are very keen to look at I suppose very beneficial ways of educating these students so that they can go home to their communities, their Indigenous communities and the broader communities in the rural areas to make the sorts of contributions which I know they want to make but at the moment the resources don't allow them to do that.

SIMON SANTOW: Some people might say though that there's an enormous gulf in the culture between where they're coming from and where being educated in. Does that pose any problems do you find?

MICHELLE HUGONNET: Well I think it is a very big and important issue. I suppose, speaking on behalf of the staff and the families at St Vincent's, we're very keen to really learn how to ensure that the culture at our school will continue to I suppose most adequately address that gap.

SIMON SANTOW: Plucking students from very different cultures and transplanting them worries some people.

Chris Sarra is the executive director of the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute in Queensland.

CHRIS SARRA: The culture of some of those schools are just so different and I don't know that they've actually seriously contemplated how to respond to the different cultural differences of the sort of children that they're trying to be interested in.

SIMON SANTOW: He argues there's plenty of documented proof that it doesn't work and at its best it's nothing more than a solution for very few Indigenous Australians.

CHRIS SARRA: Take a community like Aurukun, Napranum up near Weipa on the Western Cape, if you just pick four or five of the top gun children from those communities, then you, you know if you cherry pick those kids out of there then you take the best leadership out there and then you're left with a different kind of leadership for young children growing up, four and five and six-year-olds, the sort of leadership that they get to watch every day in their local communities.

What I'm suggesting is that we can do much, much better. We can deliver exceptional outcomes and quality secondary schooling closer to home where young Indigenous children, five, six, seven years old can watch this day to day and just become that. When you remove them from their communities they don't get to see it as much and growing the kind of leadership becomes more difficult.

SIMON SANTOW: Ben Wyatt is a very successful young Indigenous Australian. A graduate of a Perth private school, he's now the shadow treasurer in Western Australia.

BEN WYATT: By and large, the biggest failing of service delivery to Aboriginal people has been education. In rural and remote areas we've seen money go into schools but not necessarily see the outcomes in terms of academic outcomes and even just graduation from year 12. And certainly that's the case in Western Australia.

The number one schools, the best resourced schools and those that have high achievements in academic outcomes are unfortunately based primarily in the cities and if we can identify those Aboriginal students who have a desire and look as though they can excel I think we should throw as much resources as we can to ensure they're given every opportunity.

ELEANOR HALL: That's Western Australia's shadow treasurer Ben Wyatt ending Simon Santow's report.