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The Smith Family's response to the 2016 Closing the Gap report

10 February 2016

The release of the 2016 Closing the Gap report shows progress on some educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, specifically in Year 12 attainment, but there’s still a way to go in this critical area.

Educational attainment is the key to setting young people up for long-term economic and social participation.  Today’s Closing the Gap report provides the opportunity to intensify our collective efforts aimed at improving the educational outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

Improving the educational outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people requires consistent and collaborative efforts, working in partnership with Aboriginal families, community leaders, government and non-government organisations, business and philanthropy.  

Critical to improving the educational outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students is making greater progress on closing the gap in school attendance and literacy and numeracy, where progress has been stagnant or mixed.

A key factor in improving school attendance and literacy and numeracy achievement is supporting parents to be engaged in their child’s learning. Parental engagement is a bigger predictor of how children do in school than a family’s background.

Parental engagement is at the heart of The Smith Family’s work supporting thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students each year. Through long-term, purposeful and respectful work with Aboriginal families, we have seen important improvements in educational outcomes, for example in school attendance, for the students on our programs.

For example, the average attendance rate of the almost 6,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students on The Smith Family’s Learning for Life program is 87.3%, up from 85.2% in 2012. This is above the attendance rates reported in the Closing the Gap report.  The Closing the Gap report notes little change in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student attendance at school between 2014 and 2015, with attendance at 83.7%, compared to 93.1% for non-Indigenous students.

Stronger educational outcomes, including improved attendance rates, can be achieved when students and families are supported over the long-term.

We also need a stronger focus on ensuring that not only do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people meet national minimum standards in literacy and numeracy, but that they are also increasingly achieving above these standards. This will set them up to thrive at school and beyond. We must have high expectations and aspirations for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students ­– this is central to how The Smith Family works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.

In our decades of experience of working on the ground we’ve seen the efficacy of joining up families, schools, corporates, philanthropy and government and leveraging community resources and networks to support students.

This approach, delivered consistently over time, will support more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to achieve educationally and transition post-school into employment, training or further education.

Annual data is a vital and important indicator of how we are tracking at a moment in time. However, we need to lift our gaze beyond the short term. We need to envision lasting change. Lasting change requires an unqualified commitment of all Australians to these important goals.