Uniting Church pulls out of Shalom Christian College indigenous school

Australia’s third-biggest church pulls out of indigenous education after investigations into a troubled Aboriginal boarding school.

Shalom Christian College founder Shayne Blackman. Picture: Paul Beutel

Australia’s third-biggest church has pulled back from indigenous education after investigations into a troubled Aboriginal boarding school found the safety of students thrown together from remote communities could not be guaranteed.

The Uniting Church’s Queensland head, David Baker, said the demands of dealing with at-risk indigenous children in a live-in setting were too great and should be met by government.

“We came to the sober and ­reluctant conclusion … that we weren’t delivering the quality of service that was a legitimate ­expectation of the Australian community for a school,” ­the Reverend Baker said of closing the co-ed Shalom Christian ­College in Townsville at the end of the year and selling the site.

“The issues around safety and the issue around quality meant that we felt we had to get out of it for the sake of everybody.”

The collapse of the once pace-setting school, which in 2012 led the nation in literacy and numeracy gains for secondary students, came after the royal commission into institutional child sex abuse investigated an alleged gang- rape in 2006 of a 14-year-old girl boarder by four older boys. Principal Christopher English admitted to the inquiry that staff could not provide a safe environment in the boarding houses.

The decision to pull the plug was sealed by an internal review by veteran indigenous educator Ian Mackie, provoking a furious backlash from Aboriginal elders within the church who had set up the school in the early 1990s with donated money to buy the grounds in Townsville’s west.

The Uniting Church is now under fire for advertising the 26ha site as suitable for residential subdivision. School buildings and facilities that have had millions of dollars in taxpayer funds ploughed into them would be bulldozed if the sale goes through.

Shalom founder and pastor Shayne Blackman said the church was more concerned by its financial exposure to a victims’ compensation fund established in the wake of the royal commission than the plight of deeply disadvantaged children. “When it got tough, what did they do? They threw us out and sold,” Reverend Blackman, 64, told The Weekend Australian. “They ignored the moral, ethical and spiritual basis on which the property was gifted to them in the first place. They are selling for money and I believe it’s because they need the money to deal with … misdeeds that have been committed elsewhere.”

The scale of the liability for churches and other community organisations was underlined this week when the Queensland government predicted the national redress scheme would cover 10,000 victims of institutional child abuse in that state alone. The Anglican diocese in Tasmania is preparing to sell property to fund its obligations.

Reverend Baker, the Uniting Church’s Queensland moderator, said this had nothing to do with the fate of the school.

“We had to deal with the situation as it was,” he said. “Certainly, it was the loss of Shayne’s dream. But the whole church was in that, it was in Shalom, and we took great pride in the fact that it had been established. It was a costly decision.”

More than 200 students from remote communities across Cape York Peninsula, Torres Strait, the Northern Territory and Western Australia boarded there before the secondary school folded last year. With the sale of the site soon to be finalised — offers closed on August 29 — the primary school will shut in December.

Reverend Baker said Mr Mackie’s confidential 2017 report exposed a “lack of real depth” in the church to run an operation that at its height catered for up to 400 students from preschool to Year 12, half of them housed in three boarding dormitories — two for boys, the other for girls.

“It highlighted the incredibly difficult and complex space of indigenous education in Australia today … it wasn’t condemnatory of the staff, the management or the board but it simply highlighted how challenging it was to operate in this space,” he said.

“And I think government has got a bigger role to play. It’s a very difficult role but it’s such a significant issue that young Aboriginal people have the means by which they can live the life they want to live … particularly in north Australia. Frankly, I think it’s government that has the capacity to deliver on that.”

Pressed to detail the findings of the Mackie report, which the church won’t release, Reverend Baker would say only “there were significant behavioural management issues”; Mr Mackie, who was recently appointed deputy ­director-general of the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, declined to comment.

The royal commission was told that a staff ratio of one supervisor to 15 students in the boarding houses had not been sufficient to protect the children. Another former principal, Christopher Shirley, who was in charge when the alleged gang-rape happened in 2006, gave evidence that the school had dealt with about 20 cases of sexual assault annually.

A briefing paper for the federal government by the indigenous board that oversaw the school under Reverend Blackman until 2012 detailed the scope of the students’ health and behavioural problems: in 2010, 16 had post-traumatic stress disorder due to “violence and abuse” and 76 underwent counselling or intervention for substance misuse.

In 2011, 58 per cent of those enrolled presented with chronic disease or medical conditions that required care plans, 26 per cent had substance-abuse issues and 17 per cent demonstrated self-harming behaviour. By 2012, nearly two-thirds of students arrived at the school with infections that had to be treated with antibiotics, 28 per cent needed urgent dental care and 15 per cent had no accessible Medicare information.

At the same time, academic outcomes crashed. From posting the biggest improvement in a secondary school in the country in literacy and numeracy scores in the four years to 2012, the primary school returned the worst ­NAPLAN results in Townsville this year, coming in below the national average in every category.

Reverend Blackman said the Uniting Church was aware of the issues when it took control of the school in 2012, after its controlling body, the Congress Community Development Education Unit, went into voluntary administration owing the church $6 million in loans and up to $3m to the federal government on the back of a dispute over Abstudy funding.

“The whole basis of us doing this was our belief that we had a responsibility … for what was happening to those kids and start to develop a pathway that would diminish the problem,” he said. “So what do you do now? Do you dump them out on the street? The be all and end all was their welfare, or it should have been.”

The federal Department of Education and Training said it was working with the Queensland Independent Block Grant Authority to determine the future of assets at the school and a satellite campus at Crystal Creek, north of the city, built with $4.5m in commonwealth funds since 2009. This included $3m from the Rudd-Gillard Labor government Building the Education Revolution program that funded an indoor gym and other upgrades.

In a statement, the Queensland Education Department said the school had received $10.5m in recurrent funding from the state in the past decade. Support had been provided for 46 boarders to find alternative schools.

Reverend Baker said: “Everyone who invested in that venture over the past 25 years took a risk that it might not work.”