More indigenous student graduation

INDIGENOUS high school completion rates have greatly improved, both in absolute terms and compared with white Australians.

INDIGENOUS high school completion rates have greatly improved, both in absolute terms and compared with white Australians, but a new study warns there are still large gaps in all regions apart from the Torres Strait.

The study, by Nicholas Biddle of the Australian National University, also reveals indigenous men continue to lag behind indigenous women in terms of Year 12 completion.

And it concludes indigenous students who attend independent schools have poorer results in literacy, numeracy and science than their counterparts in government or Catholic schools - a reversal of results for students in the broader population.

The study found geography explained some of the differences between indigenous and non-indigenous high school completion rates. But even if indigenous Australians had the same geographic distribution as the non-indigenous population, their Year 12 completion rates would still be lower.

Analysis of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth showed socio-economic status and school sector explained some - but not all of - the difference in maths, reading and science test scores among a nationally representative cohort of indigenous and non-indigenous students who were aged 15 in 2009.

The region which had the highest Year 12 completion rate of its indigenous male residents was the Torres Strait. Of those aged 20-24 years in 2011 and living in this region in 2006, 72.1 per cent had completed Year 12 by the time of the most recent census.

This rate was substantially higher than the corresponding non-indigenous rate, the only region for which this was the case.

Other regions with high indigenous Year 12 completion rates were Brisbane and the ACT with 51.1 per cent and 49.2 per cent respectively. Cape York, Rockhampton, Townsville Mackay and Broome all had rates for indigenous males that are at least two-thirds as high as the non-indigenous male rate.

In many other regions, especially in remote Australia, indigenous Australians were less than half as likely to complete Year 12.

At the negative end, Apatula had the lowest rate of completion, with less than 5 per cent of those indigenous males who lived there in 2006 having completed Year 12 in 2011.

While not as low as Apatula, the indigenous regions of Nhulunbuy, Tennant Creek and Katherine all had completion rates between 11.2 and 12.4 per cent.

As with males, indigenous females who lived in the Torres Strait and Brisbane regions had the highest rates of completion across all regions.

One difference between the distribution of indigenous male and female rates is the ACT indigenous region. Along with Alice Springs, these are the only two regions for which indigenous males had a much higher rate than indigenous females. "The broad policy implications of the geographic distribution of indigenous education completion is reasonably straightforward," the report says.

"The lowest rates of education completion tended to be in remote areas and this is where need would appear to be greatest.

"However, there would appear to be considerable constraints on all indigenous Australians in terms of education completion, whether they live in urban, regional or remote parts of the country," the report says.