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Call to offer Aboriginal scholarships

By Stuart Rintoul

18 April 2008 - PRIVATE and public schools should be given annual results-based incentive payments to cover scholarships for indigenous students and staff in an "education revolution" reflecting the urgent need to address low Aboriginal education standards.

The proposal comes from 2020 summit participant and investment banker Andrew Penfold, the architect of a highly successful Aboriginal scholarship program at Sydney's elite St Joseph's College.

Mr Penfold says the funding would be "a bold new policy framework that reflects the seriousness and urgency of the educational disenfranchisement confronting indigenous children".

Underpinned by "substantial" public funding as a 20-year investment but developed as a public-private partnership, the scheme could, he says, propel thousands of Aboriginal students into private schools that have "the will and capacity to do more, if only the barriers of money and bureaucracy could be dismantled".

Schools should be given incentives to boost indigenous student numbers to 5 per cent of enrolments.

In his paper, Universal access for indigenous children to all schools, Mr Penfold says results-based incentive payments should be available to all schools, public and private, that achieve at or above predetermined scores.

Arguing that education is the key to social change in indigenous Australia, he notes that about 50per cent (260,000) of Aboriginal Australians are under the age of 20 and about 35per cent are under the age of 14.

"If we want to close the gap and are serious about making long-term and permanent change to address the profound disadvantage facing our indigenous brothers and sisters, we must focus on the children," Mr Penfold says.

"Around 3000 of our schools in Australia are private schools, yet there are exclusionary barriers to entry (the cost) to those schools for indigenous children, so their families have no real choice about educational options for the children. As the numbers clearly show, we don't need hundreds of indigenous children in these 3000private schools, we need thousands.

"Many of the private schools in Australia have the will and the capacity to enrol more indigenous students but are constrained by a lack of funding or are unwilling to take teachers out of the classrooms and put them behind desks to fill out endless, pointless, debilitating and mind-numbing paperwork that may or may not result in them receiving some paltry funding for indigenous students at their school.

"Likewise, there is no real choice for most indigenous families to access different public schools other than the one on their doorstep.

"If that school doesn't suit their child for any reason, there is often no other choice."

Source: The Australian

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