Some 17% of Aboriginal youth continue their schooling to year 12 compared to 49% of all students (Department of Employment,
New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory all had apparent retention rates of Indigenous students from Year 7/8 to Year 10 of 100%, with rates below 100% in Queensland (99%), Western Australia (90%) and the Northern Territory (75%) (Table D2.
Rates of Indigenous Year 12 attainment or equivalent are higher in metropolitan areas, and lower in remote areas. In 2016, rates of Year 12 attainment or equivalent for Indigenous Australians ranged from 74% in Major Cities and 65% in Inner Regional areas to 43% in Very Remote areas.
Indigenous children are more likely to arrive at school hungry, ill and tired; they are often bullied, and the use of corporal punishment is still widespread. Ethnic and cultural discrimination at schools are major obstacles to equal access to education, causing poor performance and higher dropout rates.
In 2019, the proportion of Aboriginal students who attained the HSC was 45% compared with 71% of non-Aboriginal students. Source: NSW Education Standards Authority and Department of Education administrative data.
Poor attainment has been attributed to lower I.Q. and ability, inadequate home environments, and poor parenting and not to the inadequacies of the education provided, to prejudices Aboriginal children face or to the active resistance by Aboriginal people to the cultural destruction implicit in many educational programs ...
Based on 2019 data, 92% of Indigenous children were enrolled in early childhood education in the year before full-time schooling. Among these children, 96% were enrolled for 15 hours or more per week (SCRGSP 2020).
According to the report, the common causes of non-attendance at school are external factors such as poverty, poor health and family stress. Geographical isolation also contributes to non-attendance in Indigenous communities.
Share of Indigenous Australians studying for a Bachelor degree Australia 2019. During the 2018-19 survey period, 19.5 percent of Indigenous Australians aged 20 to 64 living in the Australian Capital Territory had attained or was studying for a Bachelor degree in Australia.
59% of Indigenous girls don't attend secondary school consistently. 62% of Indigenous boys don't attend secondary school consistently.
Smart and Skilled qualifications are subsidised by the NSW Government. Eligible Aboriginal students are entitled to fee-free government subsidised training in priority skill areas with approved training providers.
About 30 per cent of Indigenous households are in income poverty, which indicates that over 120,000 Indigenous people are living below the poverty line.
The Bringing Them Home report (produced by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families in 1987), says that "at least 100,000" children were removed from their parents.
By school-leaving age, the average Indigenous Australian student is around two and a half years behind the average non-Indigenous one — with achievement levels more comparable to developing nation school systems than those of the wider Australian population.
The 2018–19 Health Survey showed that 55,770 Indigenous Australians of working age were unemployed. When expressed as a proportion of the labour force, the unemployment rate for Indigenous Australians was 3.8 times the rate for non‑Indigenous Australians (19% compared with 5%, respectively) (Table D2. 07.3).
In 2022, an estimated 33% of Indigenous Australians (297,400 people) live in New South Wales and 28% (252,700 people) in Queensland (Figure 2). The Northern Territory has the highest proportion of Indigenous residents among its population – an estimated 32% (79,000 people) in 2022 (Figure 2).
Younger Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 15–34 years who had completed Year 12 were more likely than those who had left school at Year 9 or below to rate their health as excellent/very good (59% compared with 49%) and were less likely to rate their health as fair or poor (9% compared with 16%) (see ...
The attendance rate is the average number of students at school on any day. This has been declining steadily from 90% in 2014 to 86% in 2022. The further the school is from a major city, the more marked the decline is.
In NSW, the proportion of Indigenous final year high school students attaining their HSC has gone backwards from 46 per cent in 2017 to 45 per cent in 2020 and 43 per cent in 2021.
While 5.7% of all students in Australia are from Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Island backgrounds, only 2% of registered teachers are (AITSL, 2019).
In Aboriginal communities, the responsibility of raising children is often seen as the responsibility of the entire family rather than the biological parents alone, and so adoption was not necessary and an unknown practice in traditional Aboriginal culture.
In 2019/20, 952 Aboriginal children across NSW were removed from their families, a 2.6% increase on the year prior. In total, there were 6,688 Aboriginal children in what is known as “out-of-home-care” – about 41% of the total number of kids in the system.
Coping with stress, suicide, alcohol and drugs, body image and bullying were significant issues, both for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous young people.
Why were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children taken from their families? The forcible removal of First Nations children from their families was based on assimilation policies, which claimed that the lives of First Nations people would be improved if they became part of white society.