Recording: The right to education

Descriptive transcript

Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that we're meeting today on the lands of First Nations peoples. I'm at UTS, so I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I want to pay particular respect to the Gadigal as the traditional custodians of knowledge for the land upon which this university is built. I also want to extend my respect to the traditional owners of the country where you are joining us from, and pay respect to their Elders.

My name's Verity Firth. I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS, and I head up our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. It's my real pleasure to be hosting today's event, and we're putting this on in partnership with the Human Rights Law Centre. I'll be introducing you to Hugh de Kretser in a minute, but we really enjoy this partnership we have with the Human Rights Law Centre. We have some fantastic guests: Dr Leanne Holt, Jane Hunt, Chris Ronan, and Hugh de Kretser, and I'll have a chance to properly introduce them in a minute.

So today's event is about education, and the data is clear that education is not the great equaliser it was once thought to be. Currently, the best predictors of a young person's educational aspirations and success are their postcode and their family's socioeconomic circumstances. The educational divides are widening in Australia across many lines: for First Nations communities, for students in rural and remote areas compared to their metropolitan peers, for children from migrant backgrounds, and for those without access to digital resources.

I'm really delighted to be joined today by a distinguished panel, each working to resolve the inequities in our system, from early childhood all the way through to higher education. Do families and children have a right to quality, equitable education? What can we do to ensure that every student is on an equal playing field?

I'm now going to introduce everyone to our speakers, starting with Dr Leanne Holt. Dr Leanne Holt is a Worimi–Biripai woman with over 25 years of experience in the higher education sector. She is the inaugural Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Strategy at Macquarie University and on the advisory board for the newly established Centre for Global Indigenous Futures. Dr Holt is the immediate past president of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Consortium and serves on a range of community and professional local, national, and international boards and expert panels. She recently launched a book, Talking Strong, which tracks the development of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education policy in Australia. The book records the voices of those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders that worked with communities, governments, and education providers to map a path for the positive educational future of Indigenous peoples. Welcome, Leanne, and thank you for joining us.

Jane Hunt is the founding CEO of The Front Project, an independent national organisation addressing disadvantage and improving outcomes for children, families, and society by realising the benefits of quality early learning. Jane is an innovative and results-driven social change leader who has dedicated her career to empowering people to improve the world. She is steering Australian business, government, and community leaders to place a new value on children in the early years. This work combines her passion for children's education, health, and development, and her commitment to empowering leaders to make change for the better. Welcome, Jane.

Chris Ronan is the Equity and Engagement Director for the Country Universities Centre, and he's worked in higher education and not-for-profit sectors across the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. He is the President and Advocacy Director of the Society for the Provision of Education in Rural Australia. Welcome, Chris.

And last but not least, Hugh de Kretser has been with the Human Rights Law Centre since it was established in 2006, starting as a board member before becoming its Executive Director in 2013. Under his leadership, the Centre has continued to extend its positive impact on human rights in Australia. The Human Rights Law Centre is currently building the public campaign to create an Australian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to help level the playing field for individuals and communities and ensure that the decisions and actions of our government are guided by the values of freedom, equality, compassion, and dignity. Welcome, Hugh.

So I'm going to open with a question to all of you, and we might just go around and each of you can have a response. I'll start with you, Hugh.

Now the question is: some think that if you're smart enough and hardworking enough, then there's no barrier for you to receive the education that fits your skills and abilities. Is that true? Hugh?

Of course, it's not true.

People in Australia and like countries can make it to the top, but there is this myth of an egalitarian Australia. We are divided on many different grounds. We have intersecting levels of disadvantage from regions, postcode, poverty, race, social status, gender, and so on. When we look at our health system, our housing, and our education systems, that inequality persists. It's been well documented. We have the Closing the Gap Agreement that I'm sure Leanne and others will talk about in terms of trying to bridge the gap in educational disadvantage. Chris, I'm sure, will talk about the postcode disadvantage experienced by people in rural areas, and then there's poverty and other disadvantage as well. So we absolutely need to do more to make sure we have much greater equality in our educational systems in this country.

Jane, do you have anything to add to that?

Yes, quite a lot to add! The question reminded me that we just love that myth of the heroic individual who is smart enough and able enough to navigate things, but there's a reason that's a myth, or at best a kind of exception, because it really doesn't hold true for children in their early years. The evidence is very clear that in Australia, we have children growing up who do not have the conditions that enable them to develop those foundational skills and abilities that they need to set them up for learning. We know this because we measure it through the Australian Early Development Census, the AEDC. What we have found through the measurement of that—it's measurement of core skills and abilities, things like emotional maturity, language, social competence, etc.—is that every year about 60,000 children are assessed as developmentally vulnerable as they start school. That has a profound lifelong effect. By grade 3, those children are generally a year behind their peers on NAPLAN. By grade 5, they're two years behind their peers, and those children are least likely to finish school and therefore go on and get employment and so on. But we know that early childhood education is a powerful mechanism to reduce that developmental vulnerability. Parents know it. 81% of our families and community members say we need high-quality early childhood education and care for children, but there are things that get in the way of that.

Families say that if they live outside of the city, they have very constrained choice. They have little or no choice about accessing early childhood education and care. The further you move away from the city, the more likely you're going to be at risk of developmental vulnerability. Nearly half of the children in remote areas and nearly a quarter of those in regional areas are assessed as developmentally vulnerable.

Then the other factor that's a real barrier for early childhood education is cost or affordability. 80% of families say it's an issue for them, whether they're accessing through childcare or kinder. Kinder alone is around $2,000 a year, which is prohibitive for some families. If you're accessing it through childcare, then you have to be working or assessed as having an activity. So we know there are barriers, absolutely, for children's access.

But I think there's something else we forget. I used to work with families, particularly women, who are wanting to go on and get work, so they've come from really vulnerable situations. For them, all of their being was focused on alleviating scarcity—so if it was food or housing or stability of relationships and so on. When you're trying to alleviate scarcity, your bandwidth is constrained. That is what you're focused on, and that holds true for children as well. It's really hard to learn if you are hungry. You don't get the nutrition that you need to learn, but everything will be focused on getting food and not being able to develop those building blocks for learning.

Chris?

Thanks, Verity. I just want to pick up on what Jane was saying a little bit around the narrative of the hero and that notion of overcoming adversity. In education, those narratives feed the premise of your question—that if you're smart enough and work hard enough, then there is no barrier. The knock-on effect of that is we say, "Look at person X who's been able to do this. Why can't you do that?" It embeds the notion that if someone can't overcome that adversity, they can't work hard, they can't get a quality education, then somehow they're less successful and that's their fault. I think it places the blame on the individual.

So the question is: how much does obtaining an education fall on the individual compared to the education system and the social structures that sit around and support that? In trying to simplify it down to explain it to a primary school student, you can use a running race analogy. If you're all starting on the start line and you race, then some people don't start together. You can start 10 metres behind, 20 metres behind—so they're working just as hard, but they're still not achieving, or they have to work that much harder to overcome that adversity. So it's a question of equity: is that fair? That analogy is very simplistic, but it's an easy way to focus on the structures and move away from the discourse of individualising and focusing on individual deficits instead.

Yeah, I agree. And Leanne?

Yeah, thanks, Verity. I think it's an interesting question and obviously, as all of my co-panel members have stated, it's not true at all. But I think it also is about how do we define "smart"? We use a very Western baseline to define smart from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective, and we know that there are multi-layered barriers for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to access higher education or education more broadly. They're common to other groups—like financial implications and school experiences—but there's also family and community responsibilities, which is quite unique to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Also, a big one is a sense of belonging, particularly coming into higher education. We find that's probably one of our prominent challenges for students coming into higher education. They can be academically smart, but they still don't feel that sense of belonging and that they should be here in this environment.

So that comes to universities providing environments and curriculum that is conducive to the values and experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and recognising other challenges such as racism and discrimination—and that we have a zero tolerance to that, and that we don't just say it, that there are actions that back it up. I also totally agree with the challenges that we have for our rural, regional and remote students, but I think government policies also need to consider the uniqueness of some of the challenges of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities as well.

In the report that was done a few years ago for rural, regional and remote, it stated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students had a higher attrition rate—urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students had a higher attrition rate than very remote, low socioeconomic students. Yet, when the recent policies changed to the Job Ready Graduates package, they included demand driven places for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander regional and remote students, but no matter how much we argued that this is a need for all of our students, we're still having the argument. So I think there needs to be consideration for those multi-layered barriers and what are we trying to achieve.

I'm glad you say that, Leanne, because in that same package, they also adjusted the way that equity funding was paid to universities so that, in this bizarre example, they prioritised rural and regional students essentially over urban students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. So a university like the University of Western Sydney ended up losing the most of any university in Australia when it came to equity funding, and I think that was just madness.

And another one that I harp on about is that while we use postcodes to define economic status, it's flawed because we know that some of our most poverty-stricken communities reside in urban areas. That's not taking away from the challenges from our communities in regional and remote areas either.

Yeah, I know. It doesn't have to be either/or.

No, it doesn't.

So, Leanne, I'm going to come to you now to talk about your book, Talking Strong. In this book, you explore the development of national education policies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and as part of it, you spoke with many leaders who worked to map a path for a positive educational future. What were some of the key takeaways from that book or that process?

Yeah, thanks, Verity. I loved putting the book together. I was really privileged to talk to so many wonderful past and present Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders. They continue to be our leaders. There were some really key themes. One of the questions that I asked them was: what advice do you have for future leaders, educators, ambassadors of education? There were definitely some key themes. One of them was inclusion of curriculum that builds an understanding and knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories—not just around our challenges, but also around our successes and the deep knowledge that has been acquired over thousands of years. Because when we talk about Aboriginal histories, it always hones in on the deficits of our history and not the strengths of our history. So that was one thing that came through very clear.

Another one was Aboriginal-led decision making—the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices, but also having respectful and reciprocal relationships with non-Aboriginal people in continuing to improve educational outcomes. The thing about these leaders is they looked at education from early childhood through to higher education. It was quite unique, and it still is unique. The government silos us so that we look at early childhood, or we look at school education, or vocational education, or higher education—it's all very pocketed. But like public health, these are things that we should be looking at holistically, and that message came through really strong.

The final message that I'll highlight was ensuring that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are empowered to be true to themselves and their identity as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. There was concern that we put a lot of effort into growing white fella capacity, as it was noted, but making sure that isn't at the detriment of remembering where they came from or who they are in their hearts. I'll quote the late Lillian Holt, who was a key leader and elder within our communities. She said to me that she cautioned that it's not just about the head; it's also about the heart. It's about the head and the heart. She said the greatest journey sometimes is from the head to the heart. I always reflect on that because I think it's a really beautiful statement.

That is beautiful. Jane, I'm going to come to you because I really love what Leanne had to say about the continuum of education, and she's exactly right, that we silo early childhood, silo primary, silo secondary, when in fact it is a continuum. You already talked a bit about how important the quality of education that a child receives early on is, but can you elaborate on that in terms of the difference that makes as the child goes into primary, secondary, vocational, and how it all comes together?

Yes, absolutely. The other thing that resonated, Leanne, in what you were saying is connection to family and community as well and country. Again, we sort of silo things, don't we? But for children to really have the best chances of thriving, it's education and, yes, absolutely, an education pathway the whole way, and thinking about it in that way, which is why so much work is happening in those transitions, because we've artificially created these siloed systems. There's a really key point in your question, Verity, and that's about quality. It's about supporting all children to have access to appropriate high-quality early childhood education and care. We know why it's important. Most of the brain development for children occurs in those early years, particularly 0 to 3, for anyone who has had little children in their lives, and high-quality education delivers substantial and sustained impact.

We know this because, unfortunately, we've seen what happens with low-quality education. There have been countries that have scaled low-quality systems and they've actually caused harm—they've impacted early language skills or cognitive development and so on. It's only in high-quality that you get the return. We've got some beautiful examples in Australia, including First Nations examples. There's a great example in the Early Years Education Program, which has very clear evidence that if you support children in the early years with early childhood education and care at the right amount for them—it does vary for children—plus some family support, in their work, children who came through out-of-home care systems, very vulnerable children who started behind their peers at IQ levels, after that work with the family and the provision of early childhood education and care, were entering on par with their peers to school. So we've got programmatic evidence that this works.

We've also got population level evidence. We worked with PwC a few years ago on having a look at the return or what the impact of a year before school was—so that early education. What we were able to show very clearly is that early childhood education puts students ahead at the start of primary school, and that benefit increases over time. It was associated with approximately 14 additional NAPLAN points at year 3, and then, of course, higher scores at year 3 linked to better scores at year 9 and then on to graduation.

When we released that research, it got a lot of attention from parents because what we were able to show the link between is children participating in early childhood education and their improved earnings when they got to work over time. But that is because of the education learning continuum that was put in place.

That's incredible. Improved earnings—I suppose that makes sense. You don't have to look after them for as long if they've got better earning potential!

Chris, the percentage of regional Australians with a university degree, as we've been discussing, is half that of metropolitan areas. So let's talk about rural and regional students. What barriers do they particularly face? What barriers do their communities face when it comes to accessing university education in particular? But you can talk more broadly than that if you want.

I think it's an immensely complex question, but it often elicits a rather simplified response, and I think that's problematic. There are obvious barriers—the general discourse is around cost, distance, university infrastructure. These are the things that permeate through all of these conversations and challenges and through governments and universities as well. But I would challenge that we probably need to look a little deeper than that.

To use a stat in your question, Verity, there are already 40% on average in the metropolitan areas that have bachelor attainment compared to 20% in our regional areas—so that's half as much. The point on that 20% is that's stagnated for 30 years or around 30 years—it has not changed. That's in the face of so many government and university interventions: things such as HEPP, widening participation in school outreach, increased university infrastructure in regional Australia, policy mechanisms like demand-driven funding. These things have been effective for other equity groups, but not for regional communities.

So the question for me, and that I constantly ask when this sort of topic comes up, is what's the through line for all of this? For me, it's the conceptualisation of higher education in Australia hasn't changed across those 30 years. These attempts have been about supporting individual students to change and to be able to fit the mould of higher education. The point is, this isn't just about rural and regional—this is about lots of different groups of people who have traditionally been excluded from higher education. There's been no systemic shift, and universities and governments have essentially said, "Change to fit our mould."

If we look at aspirations as an example, so much funding has been invested into nurturing and supporting aspirations of regional Australians for university, but research has shown in NSW Department of Education and a recent study in South Australia shows that aspiration is actually high for students. The challenge comes in that transition space in moving to university—be it their context that they live in or the barriers that they have. That's the key around the barriers: they have to change who they are and their identity and the community in which they live to fit the mould of higher education in Australia.

Also, in the front end of the question, we haven't talked about community yet. It's always been about university and government intervention. Where is community in all of this? Only now recently do we start to see that, and I think there has been good progress starting to be made around putting communities at the centre of challenging higher education for regional Australia. In my work, we put the community at its core—that's been the largest point of success.

So I think barriers for regional people to access higher education are deeply embedded in that system, and my provocation is probably that often the discourse is simplified to cost, distance, aspiration. While there's certainly challenges, if we truly want to address that gap and break from that stagnation of 20%, which has existed for 30 years, then we need to dig a lot deeper.

I think Leanne and Jane both highlighted the importance of education and community working together. Community is a key—because it takes a village to raise a child, and that's the same in education. Yet for some reason in regional Australia especially, we've sort of excluded communities from the conversation around higher education and around universities. I think that is the real core barrier that's driving a lot of this.

That's really good insights there, Chris. And I'm going to come to you, Leanne. I know we're talking about higher education again, but considering what Chris has just said around that sort of lack of community engagement, but also it's almost higher education's, "We know what mould you need to fit, and if you don't meet our exacting standards, you are clearly not for us." How does that actually translate, particularly for first in family students that come to university? Do you think enough is being done? What is your response to that? Is enough being done to actually help with that transition and recognise that not everything universities do are perfect?

Yeah, I think that there is a lot of room for improvement. Understanding that a majority of our students are first in family, and as Chris said, they're not lacking aspiration, which has been the focus for many years—"Oh, regional, remote, or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, they don't have high aspirations." Recent research has shown that's actually not true. It's whether their aspirations are supported from a school level—that's been a big challenge. Also, about actually linking with—there was also a lot of research on "you can't be what you can't see." We're looking at, next this year, developing an Indigenous Outreach or Indigenous Pathways Academy, and we're linking industry partners in with that so that we can link Year 11 students with an industry in line with their aspiration so that they actually can meet people that are in the professions that they're interested in, instead of it being a bit of a dream and, "It's here, but we're here, and we need to try to swim to get to the other side so that we can see what it's like over there."

So trying to bridge some of that so that the relationships with those industries and professional areas can be developed a lot sooner, and so that while they're doing Year 12, they actually can be thinking, "Well, I have this relationship with this legal firm or this engineering firm or this business firm or education or school or whatever, and I know people that have achieved this and I know what I need to do. I know I've got mentors." So making it more realistic, but also definitely engaging the parents and all of those structures around the student in those conversations to say that—we know, I remember that when I first came into the university and I was a prospective student advisor, so I'd go to schools, and I went to Kings at a career fair—I was working for Newcastle at the time—and this boy said to me, he was in Year 8 and he was helping carry the boxes in, and he said to me, "I'm coming to Newcastle." I said, "Oh, are you? What are you going to do at Newcastle?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "So why Newcastle?" "Oh, my dad went to Newcastle." To me, that showed what an influence parents have on their children's future pathways and aspirations.

So it's so important that we engage community in these discussions because they have so much influence and they want to be able to provide that information. If they don't know it, then that disempowers them as well. I know as a first in family myself, when I started, I hadn't stepped on a university campus until I came for my interview to work at a university and never had considered university as an option. I was going to TAFE at night and working full-time. I applied for the university because I was about to get married and I knew that I could get maternity leave from working at a university. It was a 12-month contract, and my father was saying to me, "Why would you want to work at a university? What good is that going to do you, and it's a 12-month contract?" So he had little understanding of what a university was and he had his own perception. So I suppose it's changing those perceptions to show that universities are actually positive places for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, for example.

Hugh, so we're partnering with the Human Rights Law Centre, and part of the reason why we're partnering on this is that we want to discuss the concept of education as a human right. So Hugh, my question to you is: do people have a right to education?

And the answer is yes and no. In preparing for today's talk, I had a look at the New South Wales Education Act, and it says in section 4, the Object of the Act, the legislation says every child has the right to receive an education. Then you scroll through this long Act and you get to the bottom at section 127, and it says anything we said in the Objects clause does not give any right to any civil cause of action.

So on the one hand, the Parliament is promising this right to education—"This is why we have this piece of legislation that sets up schools and registration and curriculum and all that stuff"—and then on the other hand, they're saying, "By the way, don't hold us accountable to this; we're not giving an individual the visa to take legal action against us to enforce this right to education." That's pretty much the state across Australia, with some exceptions.

The Australian Government has promised under international law to comply with these really foundational treaties, the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which guarantees the right to education. Successive Australian governments have signed and ratified that. We report against it. We're scrutinised against that. But we have not embedded that right in Australian law, and that's what we're trying to change through an Australian Charter of Human Rights. People who want to get behind that campaign can go to charterofrights.org.au because we think that the Australian Government should be held accountable to those promises that they've made internationally and to the Australian people to create a legally enforceable right to education.

Things are changing. In Victoria, where I'm based here on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, we have a Charter of Human Rights, but it's only focused on civil and political and cultural rights. It doesn't guarantee the right to health or the right to education or the right to housing. The ACT, the first jurisdiction in Australia to have a Human Rights Act or Charter, has a right to education in it but it's a very limited right to education. Queensland then created their Human Rights Act in 2020 and said, "We will have a right to education and it's legally enforceable." So they say every child has the right to access school education appropriate to their needs. That is a binding, legally enforceable right. It's early days in Queensland, but there have been complaints that have been brought applying that human right and saying that right is being breached.

When you look at some of the issues that Chris and Jane and Leanne are talking about, when you hear stories of children going through high school in remote and regional communities and coming out without functional literacy and numeracy through no fault of their own, they're not getting a decent education because of the postcode they grew up in or what's in their bank balance. That needs to change, and that's where a right to education can play a role, and it's why we see it as a fundamental part of a Charter of Rights.

So I'm going to come across to some of the audience questions now, because I think some of the audience questions are also about rights and discrimination law, and I think it's quite a nice flow.

The questions that are currently leading in the votes, and as I said, I'm taking the most popular questions—it's got a very long introduction. Essentially, the NSW Government is currently considering Mark Latham's anti-trans kids bill, which would erase trans and gender-diverse students in classrooms and schoolyards across New South Wales and silence discussion of LGBTQ issues more generally. The Government response to an inquiry, chaired by Mark Latham but endorsed by all three government MLCs and one of two Labor MLCs, is due by 7th of March. So that's the introduction.

The question is: how can we protect and promote the right to education for everyone, when LGBTQ kids can be lawfully discriminated against by religious schools under New South Wales and Commonwealth law, and are largely written out of the national health and physical education curriculum and subject to discriminatory attacks like Mark Latham's anti-trans kids bill? I might actually throw to you first, Hugh, because you will probably have views particularly around the anti-discrimination element of it.

Yes. The right to education—when you look at international law and this UN treaty and you look at how that's been interpreted by the expert committee, which talks about how that right is realised—of course, it has to be accessible and adaptable. Your education system has to respond to the diverse needs of different communities across your country, and that means LGBTIQ+ kids, that means kids from remote areas, Aboriginal kids, kids from multi-faith b