There has been a lot of news about changing the way schools operate in the Northern Territory Communities. These have included removing bilingual teaching and docking parents/guardians parents if the kids do not rock up to school.

NSW has the largest indigenous population in Australia, many of them in towns of the far west where a change is occurring in one small country school.

I worked at Walgett several years ago now and truancy was a real problem. It also seemed anyone with money (ie non-indigenous) paid whatever fees were necessary to place their kids in the local Catholic school until Year 6 rather than the local primary school.

The ABC has recently reported on changes to the schooling at Walgett, putting in place one school taking in students from pre-school to mature aged. The aim is to focus on aboriginal education

Uniquely for the school we’ve incorporated into it programs around Aboriginal language, culture, creative arts, performance and dance, so some quite unique opportunities and a very flexible way there for the school to design programs to really address the needs of those students

A school in a small community where I am has had different teachers virtually every term for a couple of years. In a culture where relationships are important they wonder why no one turns up!

I am interested to see how this works at Walgett. Making education fun and interesting has to be a better option than punishing families when the kids do not attend.

If you want to look at a small NSW town, I wrote a little while ago about the NSW town of Wilcannia.

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Tagged as: aboriginal, Indigenous, school, schooling, Walgett, wilcannia

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