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Access to education: a human right for every child

Chris Sidoti, Human Rights Commissioner at the 29th Annual Federal ICPA Conference, Griffith NSW, 3 August 2000

Introduction

Thank you, Megan McNichol, conference organisers and the Isolated Children's Parents' Association for inviting me to speak at your annual federal conference today.

I am honoured to be here. Federal and State branches of the ICPA were among the first organisations to make detailed and comprehensive submissions to our inquiry. They have also been a valuable source of information and assistance during the course of our National Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education. We are extremely grateful for this. While we are human rights experts we had no expertise in rural and remote education when we began this inquiry. We relied on organisations like yours to provide that expertise. The inquiry could not have proceeded without you and others like you.

I hope that we have successsfully reflected the concerns of parents and children associated with ICPA in our various reports.

Today I would like to reflect on some of the key messages of the National Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education and concentrate in particular on one significant aspect of the right to education - accessibility.

First, however, I would like to give you some background to the inquiry and the reasons why the Commission undertook to investigate rural and remote education.

The right to education

Education is fundamental to the development of human potential and to full participation in a democratic society. That's why it's recognised as a human right. Everyone has the right to education, regardless of where you live, what your race is or whether or not you have a disability.

Education is also fundamental to the full enjoyment of most other human rights: most clearly the right to work but also the right to health. And to the exercise of social responsibilities including respect for human rights.

The Federal Council of ICPA's submission to our inquiry noted this close relationship between education and other rights in the context of rural development, as follows.

ICPA Australia believes that the prospects for rural development, and thus, the prospects for a better future for Australia's rural and remote places, are dependent upon access to a broad range of appropriate educational options and activities.

This core significance of education was the reason the Commission chose rural and remote education as the subject of its inquiry in response to the Bush Talks consultations we conducted during 1998. You may recall that we consulted extensively throughout the country during that year on the human rights concerns of regional, rural and remote Australians. Their concerns were many. We were told of fading towns, dwindling populations, withdrawal of services, wholesale departures of young people, lost jobs and lives lost due to accidents and emergencies which could not be reached in time and to suicides.

The Commission decided to investigate school education in rural and remote Australia because it is so central to rural well being generally. It provides a way of understanding what is happening in all sectors of rural and remote community life and is a focus for recommendations which, if implemented, may help country people to meet the many challenges they face with creative solutions for local conditions addressing local needs. We saw good education as essential if small towns and remote communities are to have a future.

The inquiry looked into the availability and accessibility of primary and secondary schooling, its quality and the extent to which it included, in an acceptable way, Indigenous children, children with disabilities and children from minority language, religious and cultural backgrounds.

The Commission's role and perspective

The Commission is Australia's human rights monitoring body. As well as dealing with discrimination and human rights complaints, we are charged with promoting public awareness of human rights and advising the Commonwealth on actions it should take to protect and advance human rights. We report to the federal Parliament.

Our approach to education is a human rights one. The human right to education is recognised in at least three international treaties, the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education of 1962, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989. Australia has promised to honour these commitments.

International committees established under human rights treaties assess whether each country fully respects the right of its children to education by reference to five criteria.

The inquiry evaluated the evidence it received against these five criteria. We found that some Australian children are failed on one or more of these criteria. And there is strong evidence that rural and remote children are generally disadvantaged in comparison with their urban counterparts. For example, rural and remote students are less likely to stay on at school after the compulsory years or to finish secondary school. The average Year 12 retention rates for boys is 63% in the capital cities but only 54% in rural and remote areas. For girls it is 74% in the capital cities but only 66% in country towns. Year 12 retention is particularly low in the Northern Territory: only 23% of rural/remote boys and 25% of rural/remote girls stay on to Year 12.

Tertiary participation is also lower for rural and remote students: they constitute 30% of the population but only 19% of tertiary students.

There is some evidence, too, of less consistent attendance and poorer performances.

Inquiry procedures

We called for submissions in February 1999 and commenced our hearings and meetings in March. We were delighted to be joined in most States and the Northern Territory by expert Co-Commissioners.

In Queensland, for example, we appointed Lady Pearl Logan from Malanda near Cairns who had been active in the ICPA and the Country Women's Association and was instrumental in the establishment of James Cook University in Townsville.

In every community we visited we held informal community meetings, open to the public, and heard from parents, teachers, education support workers, local government, child welfare and many other community members. We always convened student focus groups - one each for secondary students and primary students. We also conducted formal hearings in every capital city, at which witnesses gave evidence and answered questions, all of which were transcribed.

The great bulk of the inquiry's material, including transcripts and many submissions, can be found on the Commission's website at www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/rural/education.

Of course, we couldn't hope to visit every community or even every region, although we visited every State and the Northern Territory. To offer an opportunity for focused participation by as many interested people as possible, we commissioned a survey from the University of Melbourne's Youth Research Centre, to which 3,128 people responded.

The inquiry received 287 submissions including from every education department and many Catholic Education Offices. Topics raised in significant numbers of submissions were

These main themes are summarised in our March 2000 publication Emerging Themes. This publication has been widely distributed, most notably, with the assistance of State and Territory education departments and many Catholic Education Offices, to most schools in the country.

In May we produced a report of Recommendations from the Inquiry, with over 70 recommendations to federal, state and territory governments and education providers. This report was tabled in parliament at the end of June.

Last Friday I launched a third publication of the Inquiry, School Communities, in Broome. School Communities highlights some of the good examples of school-community involvement we came across over the course of the Inquiry, including the involvement of Aboriginal Education Workers and community members in schools with Indigenous students, independent community schools and programs where local content is included in school curriculum. Although some of the best examples are to be found in remote Indigenous communities, the models are useful for all students and all school communities.

Today I am pleased to launch the fourth publication from our inquiry - Education Access.

Access to education

There are five criteria necessary for ensuring the right to education: availability without discrimination, accessibility, affordability, acceptability and adaptability. Perhaps the most fundamental of these in terms of this inquiry is accessibility of education.

Accessibility is undermined by many factors. That's why we decided to publish a separate report on the subject. Copies are available at this conference. It can also be accessed on our website.

 

What do we mean by access to education?

Accessibility has three dimensions. It means that education must be

available to all without discrimination, in law and in fact

physically accessible

and economically accessible.

However, in reality accessibility in rural and remote Australia is compromised by a range of factors - ill-health, poverty, isolation, high mobility and transience, natural events such as floods. It is denied by remoteness coupled with the language and cultural inappropriateness of the instruction on offer for hundreds of children.

Our report, Education Access uses a combination of case study examples, evidence to the inquiry and information about government programs including education-related subsidies to illustrate the limits on access to education which children face in rural and remote Australia. We discuss limits faced by children

who have disabilities and have little or no choice of alternative schools

who are isolated from public transport routes or are denied access to school buses

who are studying by distance education but have unreliable or expensive radio or computer connections

who are living in remote Indigenous Homeland communities without schools, teachers or tutors

who are Indigenous students whose only curriculum is in English - a language they have never heard or spoken at home

who are participating in vocational education and training but cannot find work experience placements at home and cannot afford to travel

who are forced to board at a school term hostel for secondary education but whose hostel is at risk of losing subsidies

who are reliant on computers for a contemporary curriculum but the IT infrastructure is inadequate for their purpose.

I will elaborate on three of these areas of inaccessibility highlighted in the report.

Transport

The most obvious determinant of access to education is transport. The form of transport, the amount of time taken for travel and the cost involved can all have a significant impact on school education. Many children in rural and remote parts of Australia travel to and from school in extreme conditions due to distance, road quality and climate. Along with flooding, heat and dust are common barriers to travel in rural and remote regions.

In Mungindi in Northwest NSW, with a population of 1000, isolation and lack of sealed roads mean that in wet weather some children cannot attend school for weeks. One family told us

We have been blessed with a school bus which picks our children up only several kilometres away. However, due to the appalling conditions of the road, due to neglect, rainfall of thirty points prevents the bus continuing its journey to our bus stop. This, for my family means a combined distance travel of 128 kilometres a day usually for 1-2 days but if the rain exceeds this is could be several more days. Should there be substantial rain greater than two inches our children are unable to attend school for prolonged periods and need to be educated at home.

Other families and students told us of hours spent on buses or in cars, excessive heat and cold, discomfort and unsafe conditions in school buses. Pre-school children, TAFE students and, in some areas, non-government school students are not entitled to use school buses supplied by the government or subsidised by government. We were also told of school buses which were inaccessible to students with wheelchairs or inappropriate for children with special needs.

As a result of these difficulties, students miss out on school days, parents are forced to spend considerable time and money transporting their children and students are forced to consider less suitable educational options than their local school. Hence their access to education is significantly impaired.

In our reports we make a number of recommendations to ensure the safety, reasonableness and equity of access to school transport in rural and remote areas.

Remote Indigenous communities

Another example highlighted in Education Access is lack of schooling in the Indigenous Homeland Communities.

There are many ways in which access to education is severely compromised for Indigenous students in rural and remote areas of Australia. In Education Access we are particularly concerned about the lack of primary education for many children living on Indigenous Homeland Communities and outstations, of which we heard evidence in the Kimberley region of WA and in the Northern Territory. In the 1987 report Return to Country, which investigated the homelands movement, it was estimated that between 700 and 1,000 children in north-east Arnhem Land alone had no access whatsoever to school education. There are still 15 East Arnhem Land communities without education provision.

Perhaps even more disturbing, because of the very substantial numbers affected, is that secondary schooling is simply unavailable - that is, it is not provided - outside the six major urban and regional centres in the NT. Secondary education is an issue not only for children on Homelands but for all children in all remote communities. Community Education Centres in remote communities provide only the most basic primary education, with limited tuition support for secondary students to study by correspondence. Very few do so.

For the most part distance education is not a viable option for students in remote Indigenous communities where no one has completed high school and there is no history of learning by correspondence. These communities cannot be expected to provide the support and supervision students need to succeed in distance education.

This near total lack of secondary provision in non-urban NT has been strongly criticised by both Bob Collins and the Senate Committee. One elder suggested a solution - a solution proposed years ago to the NT Department of Education.

A long time ago, we were planning and discussing the possibility of having a school for the outstations, a school that would be situated in the middle where it is accessible to the Homelands people. The school should be standing in the middle of the Homelands area so that all the people from the Homelands can access the school.

We were talking like this many times previously, but nothing came out of it. But if the government can see us and our children and recognise our situation, we would get a central school for the Homelands, a school situated in the middle of the area.

The failure to act is inexcusable, particularly in light of the Senate Committee's revelation that $90 million of Commonwealth funding earmarked for Indigenous education was 'misallocated' by the NT Education Department to its core funding.

We recommend that State and Territory education departments ensure that school aged children living in those Homeland centres have effective access to education while living in their home areas. They should

We also recommend a national audit of secondary provision and a national plan of action to ensure effective access to secondary education to Year 12 level for all students in all States and Territories including providing senior secondary schools.

Transport and provision of schooling in the Homeland Communities are just two of the examples of lack of access to education highlighted in this publication.

But they provide perhaps two of the most pivotal examples of inaccessibility for me because they highlight two core issues for the inquiry.

Firstly, transport - actually getting to or not getting to school - across diverse and often difficult Australian terrain - is the very first hurdle children face even before they have a chance to try out the quality of education. It is the impact of isolation and distance on the lives of children that unites all the submissions and evidence to the inquiry.

Secondly, although united by the theme of distance, submissions and evidence reveal that not all country students have the same needs. Indeed, many them have very particular needs which must be addressed in order for them to access education in any meaningful way. In the case of Indigenous children in remote areas such as the Homeland communities of Northern Territory, this may be instruction in their own language within their own communities rather than boarding school or distance education. Education needs to respond to the individual needs of the child as well as guaranteeing the basic right of every child to access education without discrimination.

Information technology

The third area of inaccessibility I want to discuss today is information technology.

Education access is increasingly dependent on access to the Internet and related technologies.

The internet in particular offers extraordinary opportunities for teaching and learning in remote and isolated areas, opportunities at last to break down the inequalities caused by distance.

As Dorrigo High School said to us

The more isolated the community, the more important technology becomes as a means of accessing information and services.

Yet we found that internet access remains costly and unreliable in many rural and remote areas and in some areas there is no access at all. Technology infrastructure also requires people with the skills and expertise to maintain and support these systems but we were told numerous times of the frustration of having to wait for weeks, if not months, for maintenance and repair and of the expense involved. As a result teachers in remote schools are forced to become technical experts without adequate levels of training and professional development programs to support them in this role. And home tutors struggle to ensure their children have what they need to succeed.

In Education Access we highlight the case of West Wyalong in NSW where poor quality lines and climatic conditions make internet access sporadic and limited and the schools face difficulties in getting relevant expertise to install and maintain computer systems. This leads to frustration in the classroom.

An obvious problem with computers and the Internet being down is that teachers have activities and lessons prepared on the assumption that the technology is available. Staff will often enter a computer lab, give instructions to students and set them to work, only to find that the Internet is not operating or some of the machines have 'crashed'. This means that alternate activities or whole lessons have to be taught at very short notice (Education Access, page 94)

Distance education in particular relies heavily on the suitability and quality of telephone, radio and the Internet. Without reliable access to technology, isolated students are prevented from accessing education. This access can be limited by something as basic as electrical power. One mother from Jundah Queensland, where they do not have grid power, told us

My son could only use it [the computer] at night when we had the generator on but then we were juggling other appliances and he couldn't have it on for long as we could blow up the computer with fluctuating power and then it was time for bed. Therefore he didn't become as proficient at using the computer as the children on grid power (Education Access page 38).

We make numerous recommendations aimed at improving access to a range of information technologies in schools and isolated communities.

Conclusion

As I reflect back on the inquiry process, what strikes me is the number and force of evidence from parents, teachers, departmental officers, community members and students. They express their passionate belief in the importance of education, not because we have internationally agreed human rights treaties which tell us this, but because there is universal understanding of the power and significance of education.

Children themselves have an understanding of how important that is.

In Nguiu in the Tiwi Islands - a small community of 1500 people - one teenage student, 15 year old Trevor, told us

School is about education and education is power for me. And there are a lot of things that I need to know about the whole world. When I leave school I might go to a university in Darwin, I want to be a scientist. In future I hope to be President of the Land Council.

These words give me hope that young people themselves will grasp any opportunity provided to them to exercise their right to education.

I am saddened that so much still needs to be done to give young people these opportunities, especially in remote Indigenous communities. I am aware that for children and young people a year or two means much more than it does to adult teachers, policy makers and politicians. Since we launched this inquiry in March 1999 more than 12 months have passed and the year 10 students we spoke to studying in small schools, by distance education or in boarding schools have already made their decisions about whether to continue their studies or drop out altogether. For young people like Trevor, the time is now.

The release of Education Access today completes the publications program of the Human Rights Commission's National Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education. We set out to affirm the right of every child to the best possible education and to describe what is necessary to ensure that right for children in rural and remote areas. I think we have achieved those objectives. The next job is to make sure that the inquiry's recommendations are accepted and implemented in full.

I hope that our reports give strength and ammunition and clear proposals to you in the community who have always carried the torch for rural education and will continue to do so. And that it will convince governments that education is not a privilege for rural children - it is a human right and an essential ingredient in the emotional, intellectual and social development of every child.

Last updated 1 December 2001