Footy, food and ‘family’: meet the former Aussie Rules star who’s kicking goals for Indigenous education
Former AFL coach Gerard Neesham says we’re fooling ourselves if we don’t confront the reality of Indigenous kids exiting school far too early.
Gerard Neesham wasn’t keen to coach the football team at the Clontarf Aboriginal College when he arrived there as a teacher back in 1999. He’d spent more than 20 years playing and coaching Australian rules at the highest levels. But he’d just been sacked as coach by the newish Fremantle AFL club, the Dockers, and was done.
“I didn’t want to do it,” 70-year-old Neesham says.
“But the principal insisted and I found the boys really loved it, and it improved their attendance immediately. They started to grow in confidence. It was easy to see, but I didn’t really understand it.”
Now, on the eve of retirement after 26 years as CEO of an organisation that works with 12,000 Indigenous boys around the country every year, Neesham absolutely understands how to use sport as a lever to keep kids in class till year 12.
The founder of the not-for-profit Clontarf Foundation says its program – funded to the tune of $80m a year by federal and state governments and philanthropists, and delivered via 168 “academies” in primary and high schools – works because it’s fun.
“It puts something inside the school that’s really not threatening, that’s safe and that has a lot of really rich activity,” Neesham says.
“It overrides the fear of going to school. We’re reaching boys who desperately need to feel school can be safe, that it can be a fun place to be at, where you can make lots of friends, you can journey through it, and at the end of year 11, year 12 you mature into a person who can head off and take a job.”
And this week, as Noel Pearson pitched an ambitious Cape York program focused on year 12 graduation, Neesham pointed to the on-the-ground success over more than two decades of the Clontarf academies, which this year helped more than 1000 Indigenous boys finish year 12.
Neesham argues that the biggest indicator of success in education is attendance – not curriculums, not teachers – and says it’s really pretty simple: “If you’re scared of school, it doesn’t matter who you are, eventually it makes you so petrified inside that you have to flee. Any child who misses too much primary school struggles with high school, and it’s inevitable they have to exit.
“While we tolerate the exit from school and deny that it’s happening, we fool ourselves that we’re going to get different outcomes.”
Over the years, as Clontarf has attracted wide support, some Indigenous critics have argued government money should be channelled instead through Indigenous community groups. Some have claimed the program has a “carrot-and-stick” approach that is “paternalistic and assimilationist”.
Neesham, who is not Indigenous, is unperturbed.
After more than two decades negotiating with governments, schools and communities, he says the proof is in the numbers: “Before Clontarf’s involvement, many schools, particularly in regional and remote areas, report very low attendance and retention rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander boys. In some schools, year 12 completion was close to zero. Clontarf now achieves around 88 per cent apparent retention and over 80 per cent year 12 completion, which is significantly higher than the national Indigenous average of around 68 per cent.”
Neesham, who played Aussie rules for WA clubs East Fremantle, Swan Districts and Claremont, as well as the Sydney Swans, and coached Claremont and the Dockers, hears the critics but says: “Has this been an easy road to navigate? No. Are there a lot of conflicting objectives in this space? Yes. We’ve avoided the conflicting objectives; our objective is very simple. Our job is to get these boys to come to school, stay at school, feel better about themselves, and then start to aspire to want to have a job, to respect everyone around them. To develop confidence and self-esteem.
“Does it upset people? I’m sure it does. Does it bother me? No. What bothers me, actually, what really keeps me awake, are the schools and the towns that we’re not in, not the ones we are in.
“Forget Closing the Gap, kids are leaving school somewhere between year 6 and year 9, and it’s creating havoc, and we’re not pulling it up because we don’t know about it.
“Schools really struggle to retain these boys and that’s so sad for everyone. Everyone understands that what happens in school is really what your future as a country is going to look like. The reality is the attendance is too low, which means the behaviour is too poor, and the education outcomes are very difficult to attain.”
Matraville Sports High School in Sydney is one of the 168 schools that hosts a Clontarf academy. Sixty-five of the 68 Indigenous boys at the school have signed up for the program where full-time staff deliver a mentoring and support scheme developed over many years and replicated across the country.
Clontarf is invited in by each school with the endorsement of the local Indigenous community and operates with the support of teachers who monitor class attendance – a basic requirement for those enrolled in a program of sports, meals, camps and other activities.
At Matraville, the academy operates in a large room that serves almost as a home room for students who are free to come in for breakfast at 8am, come back at morning recess for a “smoothie”, and hang out at lunchtime to play ping pong or talk to staff who are there to help with everything from personal and study issues to helping kids get their P-plates or find part-time work.
Football training – rugby league in NSW, rather than Aussie rules – takes place before or after school. Footy and food are incentives but the Matraville academy director, Jarrod Sherman, says the program is really about connecting with the kids.
Sherman studied psychology before joining Clontarf a decade ago, and says building trust is “not about being Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal” but about non-judgmental staff who also have high expectations about behaviour, including classroom attendance.
“We’re certainly not just a sporting program,” he says. “We use sport as a tool.”
NSW operations manager Troy Gordon says: “The two mornings a week when we collect boys at 7am for training is also about training them to be work-ready. So, you put out your clothes the night before, you text your mentor to say, ‘pick me up at this time’. The whole focus is around work-readiness.”
And it’s not about churning out stars. Says Neesham: “We have had boys who have gone all the way through to play in the professional leagues, and we’ve had boys who can’t play at all, and we find a role for them – they cook the barbecues, or they take out the water or take photos.”
On the day we visit Matraville four boys from years 8 to 12 explain the program, and a couple of others who have just graduated from year 12 drop by. One of them, Mitch Eddison, says the academy is “like having a parent at the school”.
At 18, his life was transformed by Clontarf: “I dropped out in year 11, I didn’t want to be in school, but they came after me. I didn’t have a job and I didn’t know what to do but they said ‘you have to come back’.” He did, and, armed with his Year 12 Certificate, is now working in after-school care.
Corporate philanthropy provides almost one-third (28 per cent) of funding – with the federal government (38 per cent) and the states (34 per cent) providing the rest – but the contacts with companies pays off in work experience or real jobs down the track.
The first federal funding came from the Howard government in 2001, grew substantially under the Rudd/Gillard government, consolidated under Scott Morrison and continues under the Albanese government. About 45 per cent of the 640 staff identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
On average, about 80 per cent of eligible kids sign up for the program.
According to Neesham, the success in scaling the model is down to inaugural chair, Perth businessman Ross Kelly, now 87, who stepped back just a couple of years ago.
“Without him nothing would have happened,” says Neesham. “I would have done one academy, and just got bored with it and walked away. He had enormous acumen in the business world and he understood what we needed to build something that was scalable. We bolted down what we needed exactly, we kept what worked.”
Matraville principal Nerida Walker says: “What the boys are getting is like a family, they’re getting mentoring that’s built in and a structured program that’s tried and tested all over Australia. It’s not a wellbeing program where they can go and sit there and not do classes. The academy staff are fully supportive of the school model, the children have to be in classes. But they fill the invisible gaps that well-off parents, regardless if they’re Aboriginal or not, would naturally fill, like getting (kids) out of bed, getting them to school … all of those invisible things that ensure success for everybody.”
On Tuesday Neesham flew from his home in Perth to Cairns to see 41 Indigenous boys graduate from the academy at the Trinity Bay High School – one of the highest number at any school in the country.
It was an emotional event for the kids and their families – and for the man who began it all.
“It’s hard to even fathom that you could be lucky enough to wander into a space and find something like this,” he says.
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