Coming, ready or not: Aboriginal children's transition to school in urban Australia and the policy push

Abstract

Concern that too many Australian children, particularly Indigenous children, are not ready to start school has spurred a series of changes to the pre-school sector. Included among these changes are nationwide mass surveying and the introduction of a unified curriculum framework together with moves towards standardised entry assessment. Focusing on Indigenous children in mainstream schools in settled Western Australia, it is argued that such measures have a limited capacity to address misplaced notions of deficit and assist Indigenous children in making the transition to school. Currently missing from policy and profession is a deeper understanding of Indigenous culture and language use.

Keywords:

• early childhood education
• Australian indigenous education
• Indigenous/Aboriginal socialisation

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the AIATSIS National Indigenous Studies Conference, Perspectives on urban life: connections and reconnections, Australian National University, Canberra, 19 September–1 October 2009. The author is indebted to Adriano Truscott and Lucille Fisher for their editorial assistance and helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, hereafter referred to as ‘FaHCSIA’, has undergone several reorganisations. Prior to December 2008 it was known as the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaCSIA). For clarity the current acronym will be used throughout.

2. The Study, Aboriginal Children Managing Schooling, K–3 2005–2008 was funded by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) under a Visiting Research Fellowship, and in 2009 by an Edith Cowan University Small Research Grant.

3. In 2009, the council changed its name to the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs, MCEEDYA.

4. For the rider attached to many of the tables of results see http://www.rch.org.au/australianedi/results.cfm?doc_id=10203.

5. See also Gorman (2006) and Galloway et al. (2008) on the impact of the language of testing on Aboriginal students.

6. Isolated attempts to Indigenise test language have been made. For example, the PIPS Baseline Assessment (referred to above) team attempted to make the test materials more appropriate to WA Indigenous children (e.g. using Aboriginal voices on the CD Rom and reformatting question structures) but for various reasons found the task too difficult and abandoned the exercise but not the test (Wildy, Louden, and Bailey 2001).

7. This is likely to be particularly so when the schedules employed, or parts thereof, albeit marginally ‘adapted’ for Australia are imported (e.g. Pips-BLA for the UK, AEDI from Canada, and LSIC from the USA and UK).