Policy fuzz and fuzzy logic: researching contemporary Indigenous education and parent–school engagement in north Australia

Abstract

‘Engagement’ is the second of six top priorities in Australia's most recent Indigenous education strategy to ‘close the gap’ in schooling outcomes. Drawing on findings from a three‐year ethnographic analysis of school engagement issues in the north of Australia, this article situates engagement within the history of Indigenous education policy, followed by considerations of how many of the issues faced by Indigenous families both match and can be distinguished from those experienced among poor and underemployed social groups throughout the western world. We find that Indigenous people are content with the schools' engagement efforts and with their interactions with schools, accepting that how their lives are lived are not within the provenance of the school system to amend. In its homogenisation of Indigenous issues, reification of cultural distinction and foregrounding of disengagement as an issue, Australian education policy is also about non‐engagement, in that it excludes key issues from policy consideration while appearing to be inclusive. The education sector does not systematically engage with the grinding issues that Indigenous families face in their everyday worlds; and since Indigenous people do not really expect schools to know how to solve their issues, the call for engagement and its resolution is perfectly irresolvable.

Keywords:

• engagement
• Indigenous education
• policy
• race
• urban minority groups
• Australia
• intervention

Notes

1. Section 122 of Australia's Constitution gives the Commonwealth full plenary powers in relation to its two Territories (currently the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory). Policies which are being contemplated for the community at large – such as powers to sequester welfare income to social engineering ends – are first trialled in the Northern Territory as a chaotic ‘proof of concept’. As the Northern Territory has the smallest population base in Australia, such forms of ‘policy sounding’ ahead of national release are logistically as well as legally feasible, explaining how it is that successive federal governments can intervene in the Territory in ways that are not legally possible with the constituted states.

2. ‘Prescribed areas’ include all land held under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976, all Aboriginal community living areas and all Aboriginal town camps, over 600,000 sq. km in total, encompassing over 70% of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory.

3. According to the Australian government's website, the ‘Closing the Gap’ strategy aims ‘to reduce Indigenous disadvantage with respect to life expectancy, child mortality, access to early childhood education, educational achievement and employment outcomes’. See http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Initiatives/Pages/closingthegap.aspx

4. An official inquiry into the laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Indigenous children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence from 1909 to 1969, known as Bringing Them Home, remains the best reference for a detailed account of the state‐ and territory‐specific and national conditions of possibility for this longstanding policy (see Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997).

5. Herbert Cole ‘Nugget’ Coombs (1906–97), was an Australian economist and public servant whose passion, post his retirement in 1968, was in improving the conditions and empowerment of Indigenous people (Rowse 2002).

6. The funding was redirected to what was called the Parent–School Partnerships Initiative (PSPI). Although the ASSPA groups could officially apply for funding from this scheme, there was a widened range of potentially eligible applicants vying for the same money, an increased requirement to justify funding in terms of education outcomes, not to mention the necessity of competitively applying for grants which had been formerly guaranteed (see Walsh and Lea 2008). The PSPI programme has been severely criticised for its hurried introduction and vagueness of purpose, with a recent audit pronouncing it was unable to be evaluated because it had no clear criteria for what it hoped to achieve (Australian National Audit Office 2008).

7. As of June 2010, Minister Gillard relinquished her Education portfolio in order to assume Kevin Rudd's role as Prime Minister. A copy of the current policy is available on the Australian government's education website (http://www.deewr.gov.au/Indigenous/Pages/IEAPComment.aspx). The ‘six areas that evidence shows will have the most impact on closing the gap’ include:

a.	Readiness for school
b.	Engagement and connections
c.	Attendance
d.	Literacy and numeracy
e.	Leadership, quality teaching and workforce development
f.	Pathways to real post‐school options

8. Town camps are quasi‐permanent Indigenous settlements existing on the periphery of several remote Northern Territory towns and present in all the major service centres (Alice Springs, Darwin, Katherine, Tennant Creek and Nhulunbuy). An exact definition of town camps is difficult to come by, due to their varied history as Indigenous informal meeting and camping locations through to Australian government administrative units. Katherine's three Indigenous town camps have a total population of 415 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007b). Before WWII, Indigenous people were not allowed to work and live in the town, a situation which remained until 1952 when Indigenous labour was sought to fill the sanitation positions to which white employees were averse (Lea 1989). Clan groups settled in quasi‐permanent yet unofficial settlements on the outskirts of the town, which expanded during WWII when numerous Indigenous men were employed by the Armed Forces. During the 1960s, the then named Welfare Department constructed government‐financed town camps, providing them with housing and amenities (Lea 1989). This formalised the camps and introduced them permanently, if somewhat haphazardly, into the local urban infrastructure of towns throughout the Northern Territory, where today, despite their proximity to towns, they continue to have poor infrastructure and high rates of social disadvantage. For instance, the 2006 Census found close to 70% of the respondents from Katherine town camps reported not being in the labour force (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007a, 2007b).

9. This is an anthropological shorthand for modes of Indigenous sociality: ‘skin‐to‐skin’ referring to people sharing space, and ‘kin‐to‐kin’ referring to the affinal networks governing Indigenous life worlds. While overcrowding can result from poverty and a fundamental lack of shelter, ‘overcrowding’ also express intimacy and connectedness, support, and mutual obligation (see Musharbash 2008).

10. Of the Territory's gaol population, 83% are Aboriginal, although Aborigines represent only one third of the population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2010).

11. A more sustained analysis is required to interrogate the connections between class, race, identity and globalisation than space allows here. We note simply that within current analyses of the achievement gap in Indigenous education, too much is attributed to purported cultural differences, to the neglect of a more ecological analysis, which highlight the greater role that socioeconomic and community (dis)investment policies play in co‐constructing marginality.