Australia’s lockdown rules ease for boarders but Indigenous students still face barriers

Tallen Robinson’s 14th birthday fell the first weekend of the school holidays but he spent it away from his family in Wee Waa, in the north-west area of NSW, and away from his Indigenous community.

Robinson is one of 3,744 Indigenous students attending boarding schools in Australia, according to the Australian Boarding Schools Association’s 2021 census, many of whom have found the pandemic has created barriers of access to educational opportunities and to their families.

The national cabinet last week endorsed the National Code for Boarding School Students tabled by Bridget McKenzie, the regional education minister, which aims to “deliver a national approach to support the travel needs of boarding school students during Covid-19 lockdowns”.

McKenzie said in a statement “particular consideration will be given to the complexities for Indigenous boarding students and the needs of their communities”.

When Guardian Australia asked whether the code guards against students having to quarantine upon return to school, the minister’s office said that “jurisdictions are responsible for implementing the code in line with the relevant health advice”.

Tallen Robinson, his mother Cherie Allen, father Shane Robinson, sister Tèa and brother Tuxton. Photograph: Cherie Allen

Even with the endorsement of the code, Robinson’s mother, Cherie Allen, said “it’s made absolutely no difference for us”.

Her son will not be returning home for the September holidays as there is no guarantee that he won’t have to quarantine for 14 days when he gets back. She said this could not only compromise his learning, having to miss out on class, but also his mental health.

The 3,744 Indigenous boarding school students reported in the 2021 ABSA census was a decrease of nearly 100 students from the previous year, which up until 2021 had shown a rising trend since 2018.

Richard Stokes, chief executive officer of the Australian Boarding Schools Association (ABSA), said the explanation for this drop in Indigenous students was Covid.

“There are families who are scared their children won’t be able to travel home. The closure of borders has been the greatest grief point we’ve had all along.”

Louise Lonergan, a wellbeing coordinator who supports Indigenous boarding students at a college in Victoria, said for many Indigenous boarding school students, the experience of quarantine required to travel between school and home adds to their feeling of isolation.

Lonergan said her school is not able to accept any more remote students because it’s too difficult to accommodate the quarantine arrangements for minors where staff or volunteers have to do two weeks in quarantine with the student.

Allen said after the eight days of isolated quarantine her son went through, he told her he felt like “I’m a prisoner in Australia”.

Lonergan said her school where she works three out of the six Indigenous students from remote communities in northern Australia have not come back to school in person since they were sent home when the lockdown first hit in 2020. They have been unable to follow online classes since most don’t have internet access at home.

Lonergan said the impact on the education of Indigenous kids has been “significant” because even for those that have come back to boarding schools “it’s been stop-start”.

“The government talks about closing the gap in Indigenous education, but it’s nowhere near closed. And the impact of the pandemic is adding another barrier. For many, they are another two years behind, for others it is two years of inconsistent schooling,” Lonergan said.

Stokes said boarding schools with Indigenous students learning remotely “are all going out of their way to help with learning and mental health”.

Robinson is the recipient of a Yalari scholarship offered to Indigenous children from regional, rural or remote communities to attend a boarding school and further their education. Allen said the initiative came from her son to apply for the scholarship. “I want to be something Mum,” he told her.

Tallen Robinson and his younger sister Tèa.
Tallen Robinson and his sister Tèa. Photograph: Cherie Allen

Yet now, because of the pandemic, Robinson won’t have seen his family since early July, and has missed out on spending the school holidays with his elders, being taught about Aboriginal culture.

Allen said her son and daughter look forward to the holidays when they have time to spend with their Aunty and Uncle who take them into the bush, teaching them about and registering Aboriginal cultural artefacts like cave paintings, as well as participating in traditional cook-ups.

Robinson will instead spend the upcoming holidays with the family of another boarder at Toowoomba Grammar who live on a farm in Warwick in Queensland and offered to take him in.

Robinson told his mother he wished he could be home for the holidays, but the one thing he’s looking forward to is passing on his cultural knowledge about the land to his friend Harry.

Dr John Kinniburgh, the headmaster at Toowoomba Grammar school, said “we understand how difficult this situation is for our interstate boarders and their families” but that the school community had rallied to provide alternative accommodation for boarders during the holidays.

Dr Marnie O’Bryan, a researcher at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy at the Australian National University, studied one remote community in the Northern Territory, where 22 students returned home from 10 different boarding schools last year due to the pandemic.

O’Byran said the pandemic illuminated the problem more generally with secondary education in remote parts of Australia, where the infrastructure and resources for teaching secondary school ages has largely been dismantled.

As a result, when secondary students are sent home from boarding school “the only option they have is to go back to the local primary school that will run a composite class for any secondary age kids”.

O’Bryan said the involvement of boarding schools was very patchy and depended on the individual school. Out of the 10 boarding schools she said only one school was in contact with the local primary school to send materials and to offer to supervise kids with remote learning.

O’Bryan said some schools may have been communicating with young people directly, but young people living in overcrowded housing without good access to internet connection, often no internet connection, meant “their capacity to engage with whatever their boarding school might be seeking to provide by way of support of their learning is severely constrained by the living conditions in community”.

She also said boarding schools continued to receive government funding for the students they were educating, while the remote school didn’t receive any additional funding to cover the cost of feeding the students breakfast and lunch, or for any additional infrastructure or staff to supervise the students’ education.



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