Developing the partnership

Kath Ward is a Deputy Principal. Here she talks about the way the school has involved the Aboriginal community in planning. Back in 2001 we began work to involve the Aboriginal community specifically, and it filtered back to the students as well. We started with some key questions that we addressed with the Aboriginal community and the teaching staff. They were about where we were at with Aboriginal education at that time, what's good about schools for young people today, and what's bad. In other words, what are the issues that we need to address? The support from the Aboriginal Liaison Officer at the District Office was important, and so were the Aboriginal mentors from the local schools, who are all big supporters of education. They were able to work at the ground level and bring in Elders as well.

The first couple of meetings weren’t held at the school but at the District Office and we had a diversity of people coming, ranging from Elders to Aboriginal people who had no connection with the school whatsoever. Teachers and the Aboriginal community met in separate groups in the first meeting before coming together. There were definitely more Aboriginal people there than staff members and we really brainstormed and discussed the issues.

The third meeting was all about ‘what do we actually want to do to make a difference?’ So we’d been through working out where we were at and now we were talking about what should be done and what we wanted to change.

So we ended up with a fairly basic plan that was based on the things that the Aboriginal community felt would be useful. One was about improved literacy, for instance, and there was also a view that there wasn't enough Aboriginal Studies happening in the schools. That was actually quite an eye opener for me. I was Head of English at the time and I knew we included quite a lot of Aboriginal perspectives, but I also knew that we didn't stand on a mountain and shout that out to the world. So we learned something about communicating what we actually do at school.

But avenues were marked out where we could improve. So we then had a fairly basic plan, which we took to the Aboriginal students as well. We actually got all the students together and told them about it and asked them the same sort of key questions: What is school like for you? What could it be like? What would you like us to do? And the kids generally agreed with what was on the plan.

At that time we tried to make the plan as concrete as possible and write down who was in charge of doing what and by when. So at the end of 2002 we were able to look at the plans again and see how it had gone. Lots of things had changed for the better.

Later came the Department’s ‘Creating the Vision’ document and the current plan really fits in with that.

Issues still come up from time to time, like in any school, and there’s sometimes friction and the need for reconciliation. We have to work hard to handle that.