INTRODUCTION
The problem being investigated
Until 1967, very few Aboriginal students in South Australia entered secondary school unless they were wards of the state. Given this history of disadvantage it is not surprising that much of the literature about the education of Aboriginal students since then[1] refers to the poor retention and attainment rate of Aboriginal students compared to their non-Aboriginal peers. There have been significant improvements in some areas of schooling. For example, participation rates of Aboriginal students in primary schools seem to be improving; the vast majority begin and complete primary school.[2] In addition, in primary school, "approximately one-fifth of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students achieve at levels above the average for students as a whole".[3] However, inequities continue to exist and some even appear to be increasing. For example, participation rates of Aboriginal students at secondary school are still poor compared with those of their non-Aboriginal peers.
In 1992, when I first began to explore the possibility of carrying out this study, significant numbers of Aboriginal students were still not completing their compulsory years of schooling (usually Years 8 and 9). Indeed an estimated 25 per cent or more of those who started secondary school left before completing Year 10.[4] In addition, only 27 per cent of Aboriginal students who started secondary school four or five years previously were still enrolled in Year 12.[5] Although this apparent retention rate was a significant improvement on the 1982 figure of 10 per cent,[6] it still compared unfavourably with the 66.6 per cent apparent retention rate for all students in South Australian schools for that time.[7] The apparent retention rate for Aboriginal students at that time was what it had been for all Australian students twenty years previously.[8] To put it another way, "the retention rate to Year 12 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students is less than half that of the national figure".[9]
More recent figures show that only about 0.3 per cent of Year 12 students in South Australia are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent whereas Aboriginal youth represent about 2 per cent of the State's population between the ages of 15 and 19 years.[10] This decline in Aboriginal students' retention is greater than the 8 per cent drop for all students from 1992-1996.[11]
Watts identified some reasons for the relatively poor attainment and retention of Aboriginal students. McInerney[12] has grouped some of these under the following headings:
Education system
Home background
Socioeconomic factors
Biological and cultural factors
It could be argued that McInerney's categorisation is inappropriate, but his work does help to organise the reasons for the poor performance of Aboriginal students in some way. Other factors influencing poor indigenous retention and attainment mentioned by Watts include the following:
As comprehensive as these items of McInerney and Watts are, they omit the obvious issue of identity. For example, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s a colleague had been one of the first Aboriginal students in his school and in Queensland to succeed and to go on to university. He eventually became a teacher and, for a time, an administrator of Aboriginal Education in South Australia. Looking back, he felt that he had had to deny his Aboriginality in order to be successful in the 'white' schooling system. It was only after he had achieved his ambitions that he felt able to acknowledge his Aboriginality and to be proud of it. From that point he spent a significant part of his holidays each year going back to the place of his birth to learn about his Aboriginal heritage. He wanted to know if things were different now for Aboriginal students at secondary school, given the legislative changes and the changes in society in general since he went to school.
Denying one's Aboriginality was not a matter of 'passing for white'.[13] It was more a matter of having to learn and apply the values of white society that permeated white schooling. For example, built into school success:
Certainly, after the dismantling of the Aboriginal school system, assimilation was actively promoted in schools so that Aborigines would finally have equal educational opportunities so that they would emerge from them 'equal with white'.[15] However, this did not achieve the desired outcomes for Aboriginal students. As Harris explains:
According to O'Shane:[17] "Very few people hung on long enough. They didn't have the motivation in that kind of system. It was very difficult." Not only was it difficult to succeed when so many Aboriginal peers did not, it was also difficult to achieve as well as non-Aboriginal students without losing one's Aboriginal identity. The latter was clearly articulated by some of the people at Strelley:
However, more recent literature about the retention, attainment and identity of Aboriginal students indicates a different trend. Students who have strong Aboriginal identities now have a much better chance of succeeding at 'white' schooling.[19] They are able to resist the negative pressures of their non-motivated Aboriginal peers and actively deny that academic success is the prerogative of non-Aboriginal people.[20] Therefore, any study of the retention and attainment of Aboriginal students also needs to explore the students' identities.
Need for the study
If Aboriginal students as a group are not staying at school to the same extent as other students then, as a group, their levels of attainment at school are also significantly less, and their post-school options are significantly reduced. In other words:
As mentioned previously, many factors have been cited as determinants of this unsatisfactory situation. However, "little work has been done to identify the characteristics common to those students who have been successful".[22] Also there is not enough information on how school factors such as curriculum, school organisation, and the intervening variables such as early secondary school experiences, achievement and attitude toward school life affect decisions made by students about staying or leaving.[23] There is even less knowledge about how these school factors and various important home, ability and personality factors are interrelated[24] particularly in relation to individual Aboriginal students.
Purpose of the study
This exploratory study was designed to extend the literature about factors that have been important in the retention and attainment of a few individual Aboriginal students who have made a successful transition to senior secondary schooling, and to explore how these factors might be related to their Aboriginal identity.
Ten Aboriginal students participated in the research. All lived in regional or rural centres of South Australia, had stayed at school into their post-compulsory years and were achieving a significant degree of success in their studies, despite the failure of the majority of their Aboriginal peers to do likewise. In more specific terms, the study sought to answer the following questions about these 'successful' Aboriginal students:
By taking specific case studies of Aboriginal students who have made a successful transition to the senior secondary level of schooling my research has achieved the following outcomes:
Scope of the study
The following provides an overview of the study: its design; the sample used and how this was determined; how the data were collected; analysis of the data and tools used; ethical issues of particular relevance to the study; assumptions made and the limitations imposed by them on the study; and possible biases in the study.
Design of the study
Individual case studies seemed the most appropriate way to develop in-depth pictures of what characterises successful senior secondary Aboriginal students, particularly as there are not very many of them across the state, let alone in the country areas of the state. The assets analysis orientation and the case study methodology fit well within the constructivist paradigm which has influenced all aspects of the study's design.
Sampling
The sample of students studied is small and non-representative. Student participants were selected if they were in succeeding at school in Years 11 or 12, it was anticipated that they would complete Year 12 or go on to alternative further study and they and their parents agreed to their participation. The final sample consisted of 7 students undertaking Stage 1 of the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) (4 females and 3 males), as well as 3 students undertaking Stage 2 of the SACE (2 females and 1 male), a total of 10 students.
Data collection
Unstructured, but focused, interviews were used to obtain most of the data. Each student was interviewed at least once. In addition, significant others (a close family member, and a selection of teachers and/or friends nominated by each student) were also interviewed. All interviews were audio-taped and then transcribed. Additional data about the students came from school copies of students' school reports, and school administrators supplied demographic data about the school.
Analysis of data
A computer program, NUD.IST (Non-numerical, Unstructured data. Information Sorting and Theorising) was used to analyse the data. Initially this was done for each individual student and descriptive case studies were written. Individual student data were then conceptualised graphically. This revealed patterns which were followed up using the original data and further search facilities offered through NUD.IST.
Ethical issues
The major ethical considerations were those of anonymity, informed consent and the level of power which knowledge gives the researcher. Anonymity has been ensured by the use of pseudonyms for the names of the student participants and by using general descriptions for their schools and communities. All interviewees gave their written consent for their participation and all students gave written consent for me to examine their school records. In addition, the student participants were asked to nominate others from whom information about them might be gained. Transcripts of all interviews were checked by interviewees themselves and participants were encouraged to make any changes they wished. Each student participant was provided with a copy of his or her own case study.
Assumptions and biases of the study
The assumptions of the study relate to its case study focus. The perceptions that constitute the case record for each student must be interpreted in context. Therefore, each case is qualitatively different from any other. Although the collective set of case records has been analysed for any common factors in the students' retention, attainment and identity, no effort has been made to produce a picture of a 'typical' senior secondary Aboriginal student.
Authenticity and trustworthiness of the data has been improved by a form of methodological triangulation. The same areas were covered in interviews with different people about individual students, and individual students' school records were also examined. Further, I collected most of the data myself and was as consistent in my approach as it was possible to be working with different people in different settings. The interviews were made flexible by the use of an interview guide rather than a specific list of questions.
Time was spent building rapport with each interviewee, making the relationship as authentic as possible. However,the interviews were prone to subjectivity and bias because of my personal characteristics, the personal characteristics of each interviewee, and our preconceived stereotypes and notions of each other and the research I was undertaking.
Definition of terms
A variety of terms are used in this report. As each of these terms can be used in different ways, this section defines them in the context of this study.
Country
In South Australia country generally refers to areas outside the greater metropolitan area of Adelaide which, it is generally accepted, has a radius of 40 kilometres. This does not necessarily conform to the definition of country as used by the Commonwealth Schools Commission in its publication Schooling in Rural Australia which defines country as all parts of the nation outside a 50 kilometre radius of the greater metropolitan regions. However, due to the shape of the South Australian coastline some country areas, such as Yorke Peninsula, are within a 50 kilometre radius of the Adelaide General Post Office (GPO), but are considered country because of their road distance from the GPO.
Regional centres
South Australia has six centres that fall under the category of regional centres according to the Commonwealth funded Country Areas Program. These regional centres are Mount Gambier, Murray Bridge, Port Pirie, Port Augusta, Whyalla and Port Lincoln. All have at least one state secondary school which caters for students from Years 8 to 12 or a combination of two or more schools which do so.
Rural centres
In South Australia there are a large number of rural centres. These vary in size and in their distance from the nearest regional centre. Some are considered remote and geographically isolated because they are more than 100 kilometres by road from their nearest centre. Many rural centres have Area Schools which cater for students from pre-school to Year 12 but some only cater for students in the compulsory years of schooling.
Retention and retention rates
Education authorities in all states and territories of Australia use apparent retention rates to measure retention of students in the school system. These apparent retention rates are calculated by expressing the proportion of students in one year level as a percentage of those students who were enrolled in a previous year, the relevant number of years ago. For example, in South Australia, the Year 12 apparent retention rate is usually calculated by expressing the number of students enrolled in Year 12 as a percentage of students enrolled in Year 8 five years previously.
Interest in school retention rates is a relatively recent phenomenon[25], and much of the research has focused on documenting the trends rather than explaining them or isolating the variables which contributed to them. Indeed, those attempts to isolate single variables or groups of variables have met with little success because of the complexity of the issues associated with school retention. Despite this, part of the focus of this study is to identify variables that are associated with individual student's retention. In the context of this study, retention relates to students staying at secondary school into the post-compulsory years of schooling.
Attainment
Attainment is one of the outcomes of education. While some authors use the term attainment, others use the term achievement; still others refer to school success. However, what is meant by these terms or from whose perspective they are measured is rarely explained. Achievement itself is a problematic concept[26]. Reflecting on the situation in Britain where research has shown that inequalities of access to and outcomes from education are perpetuated by educational structures, Tomlinson[27] asks the following questions:
One might also add the following questions:
Any quantitative assessment of attainment depends on two rather dubious assumptions: (1) that there are culture-fair methods to assess attainment and (2) that all students have equal opportunities to learn and perform via an appropriate curriculum.[28] Neither assumption is easy to justify given that the whole school curriculum generally embodies the cultural values of the dominant cultural group.[29]
In the context of this study, attainment is defined broadly and is seen to have both qualitative and quantitative dimensions. This allows for perceptions of a student's attainment by the student, his or her peers, family and teachers to be as important as academic achievement that can be measured by standardised testing or by meeting the requirements for certificates. The fact that success in an individual area of the curriculum can, in its own right, be a pre-requisite for post-secondary study or lead to a specialised career pathway is also covered by this definition.
Identity
In the context of this study, identity includes how one views oneself as well as how one is viewed by others. The emphasis is on Aboriginal identity and Aboriginality. There is no single definition for either term.
Structure of this report
This report contains five chapters. Chapters Two, Three and Four present the individual case studies of the ten successful senior secondary Aboriginal students who participated in this research in three distinct groupings: the expected stayers, the possible stayers and the unexpected stayers. Each of the case studies is written in the present tense as that is how the students presented themselves at the time of the study. Each case study includes two diagrams. The first of each pair of diagrams conceptualises the interrelationships between the various factors that influenced that student's retention and attainment. The second conceptualises the interrelationships between the various factors that have assisted the development of the student's Aboriginal identity or arose from it.
The final chapter examines patterns among the various factors identified in the retention, attainment and identity of the majority of the ten students, particularly in terms of the three groups of students. The report concludes with implications for schools and individual teachers in their efforts to assist Aboriginal students to achieve successful educational outcomes.
[1] See Watts 1997, 1981, 1982; Willmott 1982; Karmel 1985; Allen 1989; House of Representatives Standing Committee 1989; Masters et al. 1990; AEC 1991; Education Department of South Australia 1992a, 1992b; McInerney 1990a, 1990b, 1991, 1992; Marovich 1992; Department for Education and Childrens Services 1993; Titmanis et al. 1993; DEET 1995.
[2] DEET 1995.
[3] Ainley 1994, 12.
[4] DEET 1995, 65.
[5] Education Department of South Australia 1992b.
[6] Marovich 1992.
[7] Education Department of South Australia 1992b.
[8] DEET 1995, 64.
[9] Ainley 1994, 3.
[10] Lloyd 1997, 7.
[11] ABS figure cited by Keating 1996, 38.
[12] McInerney 1991, 155.
[13] Pat O'Shane cited in Mitchell 1984, 147.
[14] Harker and McConnochie 1985, 138, 141.
[15] Fletcher 1989, 279.
[16] Harris 1988, 170.
[17] Cited by Mitchell 1984, 150.
[18] Harris 1988, 169.
[19] Jordan 1984; Buck McKenzie in Pring 1990; Day 1994; AEU 1995.
[20] Day 1994.
[21] Education Department of South Australia 1993, 7.
[22] Scott 1987, 1.
[23] 23 Ainley et al. 1991, 72.
[24] Poole 1983, 152.
[25] Johnston 1990, 6.
[26] Tomlinson 1986.
[27] Tomlinson 1986, 181.
[28] Figueroa 1984 in Tomlinson 1986, 189.
[29] Allen 1989.
