Gillard's schools site should be used to help close the gap

MY School should focus specifically on indigenous education.

Julia Gillard's recent launch of the My School website marks a truly historic watershed in education reform. It is now timely to look at how this powerful tool can be extended to help address our greatest educational challenge: the Third World outcomes in indigenous education, the most critical element of the national policy objective of Closing the Gap.

Education and careers are at the core of our work at the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation. In a joint venture between the Australian government and the private sector, we have a $40 million project to provide boarding school scholarships for indigenous children to attend some of Australia's leading schools, coupled with a pathways program to see educated and job-ready indigenous school leavers move from schools to leading companies for meaningful careers.

Our strong corporate DNA drives the way we run our business. For instance, we design our strategies around hard-headed business processes and principles and proven success rather than hope. Our growth plans are informed by proven and objective outcomes and results rather than ideology. We report the facts in our annual reports, which are rich in tangible data and available on our website for the world to see. Our guiding principles are "hard heads, soft hearts and capable hands". The results of our work and, more importantly, the work of the leading schools we partner with, are proven and unambiguous and we are collectively defining best practice in real time.

From 2004 the schools we work with in NSW have increased their enrolments exponentially. This growth is also matched by indigenous student retention and year 12 completion rates of 84 per cent. In the past five years 62 indigenous students enrolled at these schools have completed year 12, with 126 students still progressing. By comparison, the national rate of year 12 attainment for indigenous students in 2008 was 47 per cent and for non-indigenous students was 76 per cent.

AIEF recently carried out a tracking study of all the indigenous students that completed year 12 at those schools over the past 10 years. We tracked and surveyed 90 per cent of those school leavers: 63 per cent have gone to university, 20 per cent have undertaken apprenticeships and traineeships and 17 per cent have gone into the workforce.

These students are not cherry-picked as the best or brightest from their communities. Many arrive at school years behind their non-indigenous classmates in literacy and numeracy, or even illiterate, and many of them come from very difficult family circumstances. All of which makes their achievements even more admirable.

These are the unambiguous facts. Proven outcomes in indigenous education. Proven results in enrolments, school attendance, school retention, year 12 completion and in post-school destinations and productive careers of the students' own choosing.

As Andrew Forrest said recently: "We've got to move on from ideology now." .

It is now timely to take the transparency of the My School website to the next level to specifically look at indigenous education.

Indigenous educator Chris Sarra is an advocate for transparency in school outcomes and is also unafraid to suggest that the alternative only enables "lazy and incompetent school leaders to pretend to parents that things are going great, when in fact they are not. It is better to have some way to flush out this kind of mediocrity in schools. I suspect that high-calibre school leaders are not daunted by the prospect of this level of transparency."

You can only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. I cannot see any reason why the same principles advocated by the government and indigenous educators such as Sarra in support of transparency for the My School website shouldn't be applied specifically for indigenous students. There are some 10,000 schools in Australia. All of them should play their part in Closing the Gap in indigenous education outcomes.

All primary and secondary schools in Australia should be compelled to disclose in My School on an aggregated and anonymous basis and using nationally consistent metrics, the

total number and percentage of day and boarding indigenous students in the school, the main communities where those students originate from, information on their NAPLAN results, attendance rates, retention rates, year 12 attainment rates, post-school destinations and the number of indigenous staff (teaching and otherwise) at the schools. All this information is readily available without much extra work or funding, it just needs to be made public. If a school does not have any indigenous students, a statement about why that's the case could also be included, an "if not why not" disclosure statement which has precedent in the corporate governance world. This would provide some accountability and scrutiny to make sure that all schools are playing their part in addressing our greatest social challenge.

All this information provides exactly the level of transparency we need in this national crisis.

Furthermore, it will assist the government in targeting public funding to where it is most needed, highlight things that are working with unambiguous and objective evidence so they can be replicated and scaled, take the indigenous education debate away from ideology and instead focus on evidence of what works and most importantly, empower indigenous families with objective information to inform their choice of school for their children and make their own decisions rather than others telling them where their children belong. High-calibre school leaders in indigenous education would not be daunted by the prospect of this level of transparency, and at the same time we would see who is swimming naked so that something can be done to help them.

Andrew Penfold is a former finance lawyer and investment banker who established the St Joseph's College Indigenous Fund and the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation.

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