title: Indigenous Education and the Policy-Making Process in Australia
Creators: name: Ballangarry, Julie G
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Indigenous education
subject: policy-making process
subject: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students
subject: critical race theory

description: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are the most educationally disadvantaged group within the Australian education system. This has been well documented through a plethora of government reports, reviews, and inquiries into 'Indigenous education,' which continue to affirm an 'ongoing crisis' of Indigenous students' educational outcomes and has led to Indigenous education becoming a prominent and ongoing issue on the national policy agenda. However, despite decades of policy attention, Indigenous education policies have continuously failed to adequately address the inequality of Indigenous students' educational outcomes. Within the thesis, educational outcomes are defined as achieving equality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students' educational achievement. In addition, self-determination is viewed as a fundamental policy outcome in its own right and as a facilitator of educational equality. The inability of Indigenous education policies to meet their desired objectives, and improve educational outcomes, provokes the question of why Indigenous education policies are continuously failing to provide equitable outcomes for Indigenous students. This raises deeper and more complex questions around the policy approaches to Indigenous education and the reasons for the failure of Indigenous education policies to achieve equitable outcomes. While there has been substantial research on the content of Indigenous education policies, there has been little focus on the nature of the processes used to develop these policies or on whether these processes might help account for policy failure. This research examines Indigenous educational inequality through a policy lens to examine whether and how policy-making processes in Indigenous education may have contributed to sustaining educational inequality for Indigenous students. The research analyses the 'black box' of the policy process and the relationships and mechanisms used to develop Indigenous education policies over the past 30 years, and how this affected the content of policy and so educational outcomes. By focusing on the policymaking process, the research seeks to establish whether there are unexamined systematic and structural factors that have contributed and are contributing to policy failure and educational inequality. The research employs a qualitative methodology and applies a level of analysis approach, that focuses on structural/systemic factors as well as the nature of the policy process, using Critical Race Theory (CRT), concepts from the policy network literature, and process tracing. Through this approach I addressed my central research question: How does the education policy-making process in Australia affect education policies and the educational outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students? Through the lens of CRT, I show how structural factors such as racism and Whiteness play a leading role in shaping and developing Australia's education system and the dominant paradigm surrounding Indigenous education. Furthermore, the research illustrates how education in Australia has continuously been used as a tool to indoctrinate and assimilate Indigenous children whilst consistently measuring that child's educational success to their proximity to Whiteness. In addition, the research identifies the broader neoliberal policy agenda of the Hawke/Keating Labor Government (1983-1996) as a key driver in repurposing education as an economic instrument in their micro-economic reform agenda. The research reveals that the Commonwealth government, and its broader economic agendas, significantly influence the policy direction and nature of the Indigenous education policy subsystem and processes. At the meso-level, the research illustrates how education policy processes and the education policy network became more centralised over time. Consequently, Indigenous input into the policy process decreased. Failure to have significant Indigenous input into the policy process helps to explain why there is lack of innovation and policy change in Indigenous education policy and so in educational outcomes. A key finding from the research is that the nature of the policy process does have an effect on the content of Indigenous education policies and so on Indigenous students' educational outcomes. It reveals that the nature of the policy process, in combination with structural factors, has maintained and enabled Indigenous disadvantage to persist over decades.