In Australia, a substantial proportion of students start secondary school with literacy and numeracy skills that are 3 or more years below those of their peers. Evidence suggests that low literacy and numeracy skills hinder students' access to the curriculum and can result in poor progress or educational failure. These students are also more…

Education for Australian First Nations students living in remote communities has long been seen as an intractable problem. Ten years of concerted effort under Closing the Gap and related policy initiatives has done little to change outcomes beyond small, incremental improvements. Programmes and strategies promising much have come and gone, and…

A quality education is a basic societal right. Yet for many Aboriginal students that right is not yet a reality. This paper focuses on the situation of Aboriginal/palawa school students in Tasmania and employs a quantitative methodology to examine the comparative educational achievements of Aboriginal school students. State level Grade 3, 5, 7 and…

In 2010, an Indigenous Elder from the Wiradjuri nation and a group of academics from Charles Sturt University travelled to Menindee, a small locality on the edge of the Australian outback. They were embarked upon an "adventure-learning" research journey to study ways of learning by creating a community of practice with an Elder from the…

Recent political and educational policy shifts within Australia have renewed concerns with achievement and engagement "gaps" when Indigenous and non-indigenous school students are compared. The position taken for this article however, hopes to demonstrate that this shift is unlikely to result in improved outcomes because of an ongoing…