Barriers to Aboriginal Education and Closing the Gap Initiatives

This essay provides an overview of indigenous schooling, focusing on teaching methods that incorporate indigenous knowledge and culture within formal and non-formal education systems. It highlights the Australian government's "Close the Gap" initiative, which aims to improve various aspects of indigenous well-being, including education. The essay identifies specific targets related to early childhood education and developmental assessments. Furthermore, it addresses the barriers to Aboriginal education, such as overcrowded housing and poverty, which significantly impact students' learning and health. The essay concludes by referencing academic sources that discuss indigenous education, decolonization, and the importance of cultural mentoring.

Indigenous Schooling

INDIGENOUS SCHOOLING
• Indigenous schooling refers to teaching methods which
specifically focus on the indigenous, methods, models and
content within the non-formal and formal education
systems.
• These schooling methods identifies that learning and
thinking add expressed by doing something. This means
that learning the way to do is an essential process.

CLOSE THE GAP
Education has always been one of the major focus of the government to further improve the wellbeing
and health, income, employment, health literacy, working conditions and range of social benefits. The Australian
government was looking to close the gap education related targets, few of the target set by Australian government
in close the gap are:
• Increasing the proportion of the indigenous children which are enrolled in the year before schooling. The
early childhood education was aimed to 95% by the end of 2025.
• Increased proportion of indigenous children by assessing the developmentally on track on every 5 domain of
the Australian Early Development Census to increased percentage of 55 by the end of 2031.

CLOSE THE GAP

CLOSE THE GAP

Barriers to aboriginal education
• Overcrowded houses of aboriginal students- it becomes a
difficult task for the aboriginal students to learn and do
homework at their home due to overcrowded houses.
• Poverty- the parents of Aboriginal students are unable to afford
good healthcare services which leads to poor health then the
peers children. Many health issues such as eyesight, hearing
issues directly impact the learning of the student.

References
• Pratt, Y. P., Louie, D. W., Hanson, A. J., & Ottmann, J. (2018). Indigenous education and decolonization. In Oxford
Research Encyclopedia of Education.
• Burgess, C., Bishop, M., & Lowe, K. (2020). Decolonising Indigenous education: the case for cultural mentoring in
supporting Indigenous knowledge reproduction. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 1-14.
• Fitznor, L. (2019). Indigenous Education: Affirming Indigenous Knowledges and Languages from a Turtle Island
Indigenous Scholar’s Perspective: Pikiskēwinan (Let Us Voice). In Perspectives on Indigenous writing and
literacies (pp. 29-66). Brill.