Foreword

The education outcomes of Indigenous Australians have been a focus of policy attention for many years, but there has been no sustained improvement in Indigenous primary school students’ literacy and numeracy achievement. This suggests that current policies are not working, and that we need a stronger evidence base about what might work best to improve Indigenous education achievement.

This self-initiated research project was able to access a new national dataset that links information about all primary school students’ literacy and numeracy achievement and demographic characteristics with information about the schools they attend. This made possible novel analysis of Indigenous Australian primary school students. But that analysis could only take us so far. While our analysis of the data provides new and useful insights, and some that are policy relevant, only a subset of the characteristics thought to be associated with education achievement are observed in the data.

More work is needed. One avenue our analysis identifies is the need for rigorous and systematic evaluation of schools where Indigenous students have higher achievement than might have been expected given their characteristics and those of the schools they attend. Our research finds that there are such ‘outlier’ schools, but public evaluations are few and far between.

Along with our current inquiry into the national education evidence base, this report should provide a better understanding of what evidence matters for better informed education policy that improves education achievement for Australian students.

This paper was produced by a team led by Lou Will, and included Josh Craig, Elizabeth Hynes and Rebecca Chin. It was overseen by Deputy Chair Karen Chester.

Peter Harris
Chairman