Indigenous adults on site

… the partnership between the school and the classroom teacher and the AEW and the parents and the student is very important

Debbie Moyle (at right) is the Chair of the ASSPA Committee and Muriel O'Loughlin the Aboriginal Education Worker at Salisbury North P-7 School in the northern suburbs of Adelaide.

Muriel: The attendance has improved. Attendance with all Aboriginal students at Salisbury North is quite good. Don't have any major problems with kids not turning up. It's something that they look forward to, the challenges that they meet when they come to school, the relationships they have with their teachers and other students within the school, because it's a very multicultural school. Friends from all walks of life.

Maybe for one or two families lateness may be a problem. But this is where I come in and do the supporting parents part — how we can work out strategies to deal with this and that problem. That can come in the way of me picking the kids up in the morning, helping provide lunches for the kids at school so that they don't have to stay home because they don't have any lunch. That type of thing.

A few of our Aboriginal students live out of the Salisbury North area, but parents want their children to come to the school because of the good learning environment that the kids get here, and plus being on a personal level with me, and a family member with some of them as well, it makes it easier for them to relate to me and the school, and therefore they don't have any problems with their kids coming.

I do a pickup and a drop off with this or that certain family. Follow-ups through home visits. Keep records of attendance with other teachers, meet with other teachers. We continue to keep doing it because we want to support our kids so that they will be able to learn.

After consultation with Muriel, Salisbury North staff are able to provide information to some parents about attendance and lateness in graphic form.

Debbie: Even though the formal record keeping is critical, it's how the staff are presenting it back to parents that matters. You can write it in words that your child has attended twenty days out of forty or whatever, and parents won't really look at that. They go, oh gee. They may look at it and they may be a bit concerned. But what the staff have done here, they have put it in a pie chart and broken the issues up. Families can really see where things are going wrong. It's the visual aspect. The parents can see that this child has been late this many times or been away this many times.

So when Muriel and the staff are talking about developing strategies, they know what to focus on. So if lateness is one of the issues well then Muriel will say, I'll come by, or I'll beep my horn or I'll do something like that.

The other thing is the follow up, so from term to term parents can also see the distance travelled. That - yes they have started to do things, all these strategies are working, because that pie chart or that shaded area has now closed and they are at school longer and things like that. That's a powerful tool for sharing information, of showing data.

They feel because of the way that Muriel approaches them, it's actually a part of the whole report, it's not seen as a separate thing. The staff have tried to include this type of information as generally as possible. So parents don't feel this is only happening to me. But the information they are getting is only related to their child. So therefore it is a personal thing.

The ASSPA committee had a look at the format. So they were consulted — is this a good format? — and we endorsed it.

I've seen families say school is failing our kids. But the majority of the time those kids are supposed to be attending, they are only coming fifty percent of the term, but the blame is still on the school. The school can do so much but you've got a job, a partnership here to get them here on time, every day — then schools can do their job. So the partnership between the school and the classroom teacher and the AEW and the parents and the student is very important.