Fight to educate 'remote' Australians has lessons for UK
John Freeman
Monday, July 20, 2015
I have worked in several local authorities and they all seemed very different to each other - Inner London, Birmingham, Somerset, Dudley.
![The lesson focuses on the importance of communities coming together to ensure every child benefits from the best education. Picture: bibiphoto/Shutterstock.com](/media/142814/examsshutterstock177793613-350x250.jpg?&width=780&quality=60)
Taking the last two, Somerset has a population of about half a million over 1,600 square miles, while Dudley has about one-third of a million people in only 35 square miles - much more densely packed and with a very different demography. The local geography had a major effect on the ways these two local authorities delivered services of all sorts.
Sometimes, though, it's worth thinking about other places and the very different challenges they face. My boss in Somerset had a picture on his office wall of a school in Namibia crowded with children, with a corrugated roof and no walls. At the time we were making the case for Somerset schools being underfunded, and indeed they were, compared to other local authorities in England, but making the comparison with Namibia was a salutary experience.
I've been reading People Like Us by Kathy Boladeras, a history of education for rural children in western Australia. I have used the word "remote" in the past to mean small schools with a single class in deepest Somerset, and there is no doubt that these schools face real challenges. In Dudley, by contrast, any primary school that fell below 210 on roll was considered to be "at risk".
"Remote" has a different meaning in western Australia. To give a feeling of scale, the Boladeras cattle station is over a million acres and the front drive, if you can call it that, is a rough track taking two hours to cover, with the nearest shops a four-hour drive away. So education as we know it, based around schools that children attend on a daily basis, is just impracticable.
Most education has, inevitably, to be delivered locally, by parents, and the system evolved over many years to meet local circumstances. Just as in the UK, though, most people live in towns and cities, and relatively few live remotely. The political clout of the station workers was severely limited, and the story has been one of continuing bloody-minded persistence to get the state and federal governments to take action.
The starting point was the availability of correspondence lessons from 1918, which were the only form of state education available until the late 1950s, when the School of the Air was introduced. By 1969, though, there were still families unable to afford the radio hire, the correspondence material was woefully outdated and, perhaps worst of all, there was no provision of any sort for children with learning difficulties or their parents. In stark contrast, by the same year, school-based education in the UK, and in urban Australia, provided free compulsory education through to age 16, with effective specialist support services.
By the early 1970s, the economic conditions were such that stations could not afford staff while both parents in households were having to work, while banks were tightening lending conditions to exclude education expenses.
People Like Us tells the story of extraordinarily remote communities and how they came together to give every child a decent education. The original campaigning objectives back in 1969 were "free and compulsory education, subsidised hostel accommodation for post-School of the Air students, provision of regional government hostels and improvements to the School of the Air for primary children". Remember, these were not entitlements but unrealised ambitions. The state minister's response was telling - in his opinion, he said, the "responsibility for education lay with parents, he had no funds to support remote education, and he was well aware that people valued education highly and would provide it themselves".
In 1972, the Isolated Children's Parents' Association of Western Australia was formed, battling for years to deliver learning for all, and to secure state and federal funding. Even in 1990, the federal budget delivered large sums for urban working parents to access childcare, but nothing at all for rural parents, so ICPA lobbying had to be loud and vocal. By 1999, things were looking up - with increased boarding school allowances, improvements to the radio technology and intervention services for children under eight.
Are there messages for us in the UK from this story of remote western Australia? I think so - not in the details, but in the absolute importance of communities coming together to ensure that every single child benefits from the very best education, and not accepting any less. Our challenge is that competition, not co-operation, is driving what happens, with the devil taking the hindmost.
John Freeman CBE is a former director of children's services and is now a freelance consultant Read his blog at cypnow.co.uk/freemansthinking