Is the only option boarding school?

Season 5

15 June

It can be a hard case to argue… that your children should be subsidised to attend a private boarding school. But when you live in rural and remote Australia, boarding school is really the only option.

The Federal Government doesn’t fund state boarding schools (and you could only imagine the expense if they did). So if you are running a farm 600 kilometres away from the nearest high school, your only option is an expensive private school or distance education. But how many teenagers do you know, want to hang out with their Mum and Dad all the time?

Yes, some farmers can draw down on their land assets to help afford private schooling. But what about the wage earners in town? Many of them are forced to leave small towns, so their children can go to school in the cities. This has a huge knock-on effect for rural communities. So is there a way to make it easier for everyone?

Hear from:

Louise Martin - President, Isolated Children’s Parent’s Association. Louise lives on a sheep and cattle property 30km from Tambo, in QLD. She is the mother of twins.
Alana Moller - lives on a cattle station in central, west of Clermont, QLD. She is the mother of children at boarding school.

Louise and Alana share the realities of what it’s like to send your children to boarding school. From the fees, to the restrictions… and simply not being able to see your child every morning. These mothers share it all.

Follow Ducks on the Pond on Instagram. This is a Rural Podcasting Co. production. Love this podcast? You might also like: Two Smart Blondes and Town Criers.

Alana Moller: 0:04
We get to kiss them goodnight every night. We get to say good morning to them in the morning, get them out of bed, get them ready to school. We do all that and then, all of a sudden, they go away to boarding school and we can't even say good morning to them.
Louise Martin: 0:15
And there is a massive perception that we're just rich white people wanting to send our kids to fancy schools in the city, and that is so far from the truth.
Kirsten Diprose: 0:33
How far would you be willing to travel for your kids' education? And if there was no school at all in your area, would you be happy sending them to boarding school? Is that the only option? Hi, I'm Kirsten Diprose and welcome to Ducks on the Pond, brought to you by the Rural Podcasting Co. Today's episode is all about how to make distance education, or boarding school, work for you and your family, and this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, buy CC Fine Jewellery. Check out their website for beautiful Australian gold designs.
Kirsten Diprose: 1:09
In Australia, three in four boarding school students are from regional and remote areas. Those are kids that grow up in small communities who are then thrust often into unfamiliar urban environments for their school years. That adjustment can be difficult, not just for the kids, but for the parents as well. Now, I know sometimes you'll hear poor, rich farmers having to send their kids to boarding school, and that's part of the battle as well, as you're about to hear. So in this episode you'll hear from two mothers who have their own experience of navigating the challenges presented to rural parents who are simply trying to get their kids an education.
Kirsten Diprose: 1:46
The first is Alana Moller. Alana provided distance education to each of her three kids before sending them to boarding school in Townsville. Alana actually used to work as a secondary school teacher, but she gave that up to devote her energy to her own children. And then you'll hear from Louise Martin. Louise is the federal president of the Isolated Children's and Parents Association, which is a not-for-profit designed to give a voice to rural families on the topic of education. One of the things the organisation is pushing for is formal recognition of the hours of work that parents like Alana do, so let's hear a little bit more about that first. Here's Alana's story in her own words.
Alana Moller: 2:39
I live on a cattle station in central western Queensland, so we're about an hour and a half west of Clermont and our cattle station is called Star of Hope.
Alana Moller: 2:47
It's basically it's just my husband and I here now, because the kids are all off two at boarding school and one at university in Brisbane and we've my husband's family's been had cattle properties in the area for sort of 100 years and I married Scott after meeting him through doing a teaching prac in Clermont back 22 years ago, 23 years ago or something like that.
Alana Moller: 3:14
No, it was the year 2000. We actually met so 25 years ago, and then, yeah, we got married and we lived on his like with his family on the property and then we came out to Star of Hope 20 years ago and we have just run it on our own since then, essentially with a fair bit of help from grandparents and that sort of thing. But essentially we've just it's been us and the kids and yeah, we just do our thing here. For 14 years I had to teach the kids because of where we live, so we it's too far away from a school for the kids to go to primary school as well as high school and during that time we had For those first few years.
Kirsten Diprose: 3:49
As their teacher, as well as their mother, alana had more access to her kids than most parents, but the flip side of that came when it was time for them to attend boarding school.
Alana Moller: 4:00
Hindsight's 20-20. I definitely didn't realise how big of a struggle it was going to be. I definitely didn't have any concept of what it was going to be like. I didn't have to go to boarding school. My husband he went to school in town, so he was a weekly boarder in town and he hated that and was determined that our kids had to go to a real boarding school and get proper experience. But I had no idea, I didn't know really what to expect of it because I hadn't had that background as such.
Alana Moller: 4:29
I actually did a bit of a presentation for our school, our boarding school, this year to show their new staff and one of the examples I gave them of how challenging it can be is so, yeah, we had the kids for 24-7 until they're about 11 or 12, 24-7. We're doing everything. We work together, we play together, we do school together. We do everything together. We get to kiss them goodnight every night, we get to say good morning to them in the morning, get them out of bed, get them ready for school. We do all that for the first 11 or 12 years of their life and then all of a sudden they go away to boarding school and we and we can't even say good morning to them and that it seems such a simple thing. But it's huge in their lives and our lives suddenly being completely disconnected from each other. And, as I said, we were prepared. We knew they had to go. They knew they had to go and certainly within that age group of when they get to end of grade five, grade six, you can feel that they need to go somewhere.
Alana Moller: 5:24
You just can't give them what they need as preteens, as young people. We can't give them everything that they need. I can teach the curriculum I was a trained teacher. I've no doubt I could probably teach the high school curriculum as well but I can't teach them how to sit in a classroom with other kids. I can't teach them to put their hand up and ask a question. I can't teach them to go and find somebody to sit with at lunchtime. We just can't do that at home. What I often talk about, what I often feel, is we send them away to boarding school because it's holistic for them. It gives them a holistic education. It teaches them how to be in the real world, because the way we live is very unique and not necessarily it isn't at all equatable to mainstream if you like.
Kirsten Diprose: 6:06
Despite the difficult lifestyle transition, Alana and her children have done their best to make it work.
Alana Moller: 6:13
Our eldest. Look, I didn't know, she didn't know, we didn't know what we were doing. I still had two kids at home teaching and, look, I have a lot of regrets about my oldest child and what I. You know how I approached it and how I approached her in the situation. But my middle daughter is doing, has done, exceptionally well. She's actually the school captain at her boarding school this year, which is quite phenomenal for a boarder to take to get that role. And the youngest one she's probably been our hardest to send. She's our homebody who just wants to be at home. But in saying that she went at the beginning of last year and by the end of the Christmas holidays, our great weeks at home although she still loves here and loves the animals and that she was just like, oh, it would be really good to see some other people and get to do some fun stuff, go shopping and things, and when you see that, when you see them grow and learn to be a regular human being, it makes it that little bit better. It's always bittersweet, the whole thing's always bittersweet.
Alana Moller: 7:16
When I was last week, we had the induction ceremony where my daughter got her badge and all that, and I wrote a little post on Facebook saying the feeling I had was that you can. I discovered that my heart can be bursting with pride while also breaking because I knew I had to leave them as well, can't really explain it unless you've experienced it. For me being somewhat of a control freak and particularly being so responsible for their schooling, as well as just their upbringing and everything else, I have really struggled with letting go, and it depends on the child a bit, and with my eldest she was really pleased to not have me involved in anything. My other two I do. The fact that they still do call on me at times and they still need me and I've gotten to know, particularly with the middle one she'd been away for a while. The little one, we're still working through some things. With the the middle one she's been away for for a while. The little one we're still getting working through some things. But the, the middle one, I just know when she needs me and and I can just tell that if she'll ring up and it'll be and I'll just be like I need to allow some time tonight because she's needing me and what happens is that they I think they look, they've got friends, they've got staff up there looking after them all that.
Alana Moller: 8:25
But often they just want to vent and they just want somebody away from the situation to vent to. And possibly teenagers living at home with their mum might be opposite they might vent to somebody else. But I do just find sometimes I just need to listen to them and let them get all the crap out. That they had a horrible day with this kid that is in the bed next to them, or they had this awful day with the teacher, and so I just have to listen and not try and fix it for them. I have been caught in that trying to fix it situation but I'm learning.
Kirsten Diprose: 9:02
A round trip from Alana's home to Townsville, where her children attend boarding school, takes 14 hours by car and there is no public transport option at all.
Alana Moller: 9:13
But yeah, no, it's a fair hike. But I guess the reason we went to Townsville and went for school was because we were doing distance ed at a community fairly close to there, so it all worked in and now we do business there and that sort of thing. So what we all worked in and now we do business there and that sort of thing, so what we've developed is that now we do some business up there, we take motorbikes for services and things like that, and so that allows us to spend a bit more time with them and gives us a I hate to say a reason to visit them, because you don't have to have a reason to visit. It makes things a little bit more accessible and easier to deal with, because we can do other stuff while we're there as well.
Kirsten Diprose: 9:48
And being a boarding student can throw up a very special set of social challenges within the school environment.
Alana Moller: 9:55
My girls say they feel like they're a renter crowd for the school to an extent, Because they're there, they have to do stuff and they have to be a part of it, whereas the day kids get a plenty more leeway, and even COVID was a really great example of it. So we heard stories. I heard stories and it happened at our school, not as much because we were in North Queensland, which we were really grateful about, but in other schools where the boarders wouldn't be allowed to step outside the boarding house once school finished, whereas all their day bank, as we call them mates could go down the street and do whatever they liked. And so there was almost. The boarders almost became almost second class citizens because they were so restricted in what they do.
Alana Moller: 10:36
And my kids do talk about being very restricted by boarding, because if you have your kids at home and they might be, they might go down the street with their friends and they might have an ice cream after school before they come home and they just whatever might happen in that situation, particularly teenagers in that 15 to 17-year-old age gap. So for our kids at boarding school they can't leave the boarding house unless they put in leave. Get it approved by me and get it approved by our staff member. So if all their friends on a Friday afternoon say to them and this is the example one of my daughters has given me if all of my friends on a Friday afternoon want to go down to Macca's on the way home from school because there's a Macca's just down the road and have an ice cream before they go home, they organise it at 2.30 on Friday afternoon. They don't organise it on Thursday when I was supposed to have my leave in, because you're going to have it in 24 hours beforehand so everybody can approve it, so I miss out on going for ice cream and so that then makes it difficult for the boarders to actually interact with the day student. That is something that I'm really conscious of and I've certainly spoken to our school about trying to make sure that the borders are included with the daybugs and vice versa, ensure that the daybugs and not only the kids, the teachers understand what these borders have to deal with and what they're doing.
Alana Moller: 12:00
It's really hard to explain any, to really go into the depths and explain it to anyone, the true sense of the word.
Alana Moller: 12:06
It's really something that unless you have to do it yourself, you don't probably understand it, Then that's true, no fault of anybody's, and but I guess that what's important about that is what the message that I feel from that is listen to the people who do know.
Alana Moller: 12:19
And when there's decisions happening and there's people around schools and the cost of independent schools and that question about whether they should be funded and all those sorts of things, remember the ones who have to use them or don't have a choice, and remember to go to those people and go hey, what needs to be done in this space? We've just got to have a voice, because it is so important to have kids. It's their education, it's their future and we can't expect rural and remote communities to be second-class citizens. That can't happen and shouldn't happen. And there's every reason why, you know, the rural and remote Australia is so important to our whole, you know, our whole of Australia. Why shouldn't they be given opportunities that everybody else gets? And we're not talking about the key word is equity. We understand, as I say, that they can't have it necessarily the same as everybody else, so let's make it as best we can with the situation we've got.
Kirsten Diprose: 13:29
Making the best we can with the situation. We've got Just one of the many gems of wisdom from Alana in that conversation. Something else she mentioned was the importance of giving rural families a voice in the decisions made around their education, which is a perfect way to introduce my next guest, Louise Martin, who is the National President of the Isolated Children and Parents Association. She's also a rural mother herself, with her own experience motivating her to speak on this topic. But before we get to my chat with Louise, first a message from our sponsor. First a message from our sponsor. We're calling it an ode to the ducks that came before.
Kirsten Diprose: 14:14
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Louise Martin: 15:24
I live near a small town called Tambo in western Queensland, between Charleville and Longreach. It's pretty much in the middle of the Queensland. We're 900 kilometres west of Brisbane and in our country here we grow merino sheep and my husband and I have a property here where that's our main income, and we have twin daughters who've just finished year 12 and starting their next phase in life.
Kirsten Diprose: 15:49
And so am I starting my next phase in life, which has been an interesting challenge, wow Look we're here to talk about school and boarding and what it's like for rural families, trying to make that happen. You've obviously just done that. Where did your kids go to school, your girls?
Louise Martin: 16:06
They started their schooling journey on doing school of distance education. For prep and year one we were just too far from town to make the trip to go to the local state school. When they got to year two we caught the school bus into our little local P to 10 school in our local town. When they got to year seven they went to boarding school in Brisbane.
Kirsten Diprose: 16:32
So how far away is Brisbane from Tambo?
Louise Martin: 16:36
Brisbane is about 900 kilometres from Tambo, so if you're setting out in the morning, it's about a 12-hour day to get from start to finish, including stops. And of course, when we're going to boarding school we always have to stop at the smoothie shop in Chinchilla because they have the best smoothies. So a big day drive. We have other options. We can fly to Brisbane but it depends on if you want to drive one hour, two hours or three hours to get to the plane. But it is an option. And we have a bus, but of course with boarding school kids there's car loads of gear and whatnot. So we often drove down to school beginning and end of term.
Kirsten Diprose: 17:17
The remoteness is quite extraordinary. I'm a Victorian. Things are just close relatively for us, but look, a lot of people board in Victoria still, but different where you are. I think, because there is no option. What other option would there be?
Louise Martin: 17:32
That's it. There is no option. We have no access. In Queensland, where I live, there's 12 local government areas that actually don't have a high school. For me, our small school does have a year. It goes up to year 10, but there's a very limited subject offering and very little opportunity for the kids to do any extracurricular activities, which becomes increasingly important as the children grow older team sports, music and that sort of thing. For year 11 and 12, I would have to drive it's 100 kilometres in one direction or 200 in another.
Louise Martin: 18:12
If that was the nearest high school. What do I do? If they're going there, there's no boarding facilities, there's no hostel for them to stay in, and so, therefore, boarding is pretty much the only option. And when you're considering where you're sending your children away to boarding school, it's also about access the easiest way to get there. Do you have family connections wherever you're choosing to send your child away to school? For example, my sister, my mum, lives in Brisbane. One of my girls got a shocking case of chickenpox at boarding school just about COVID time. To have my family members in Brisbane was very advantageous because they could look after my child when she was sick.
Kirsten Diprose: 18:56
So boarding school has been around for a long time in our society for children and particularly people in remote areas. What's the issue?
Louise Martin: 19:06
now. Boarding school has always been around and people have often chosen to send their boarding school. That's been a choice that they've made, because, whatever circumstances are in that regard, rural and remote families don't have a choice. So we are ending up at boarding schools, and by nature, boarding schools are generally in a big city, attached to an independent school and priced accordingly. It's very expensive to send a kid away to boarding school, and that's our main issue is how can we afford the boarding school? Is how can we afford the boarding school when we have no access to a normal school? We then our hand is forced to send our children to expensive schools because that's where the boarding is attached. So that's our biggest challenge is how do we afford that opportunity to give our children the best education?
Kirsten Diprose: 20:01
What's the assistance you get at the moment from the government, and which government?
Louise Martin: 20:07
Each state has varying state allowances to assist, usually in the form of some travel to get you to and from the school and some measure of tuition assistance, Because if you're going to boarding school you have to pay for the tuition because it's not a public school. And then the federal government has an allowance called the Assistance for Isolated Children, which is available to children right across Australia. It was introduced in 1973 by the then Labor Education Minister, Kim Beazley, and they set that as a 55% of covering costs of boarding, which seemed to be fair and reasonable at the time Because obviously, if your child is at home, there's expenses if your child is at home, but the additional expenses for boarding families is the moving away from home. So it was deemed that that was an equitable amount to support remote families to educate their kids at boarding school.
Kirsten Diprose: 21:11
And how does that play out now? Does it still act like a 50% kind of allowance?
Louise Martin: 21:17
Unfortunately not. That is one of our current pushes for the government because over time that's eroded. It's now sitting varying to be about in the mid to the late 30s. The reason being is the allowance is only ever increased by the CPI, which is always a lot less than the education sub-index of the CPI, which sounds quite complicated. So it's going up incrementally less than what the boarding fees are going up. So it's eroded away over that time. So ICPA has been lobbying hard in recent times to get that allowance back to the 55% which was its original intent.
Kirsten Diprose: 22:08
Do you think some of this debate plays into that kind of almost class debate that happens about? Oh why should you get subsidised to send your kids to these private or these elite schools in the big cities?
Louise Martin: 22:20
That is a huge barrier for us. I think the federal government sees CPA coming. We are a very well respected organisation within government and we are fortunate enough to be able to visit the Minister of Education at Parliament House in Canberra, so we feel very privileged that we get there. Get there. We are the representation of all of our members when we go to Parliament House and there is a massive perception that we're just rich white people wanting to send our kids to fancy schools in the city and that is so far from the truth. It's unfortunate that continues to be their thoughts.
Kirsten Diprose: 23:01
Could there be other options? Could boarding? I don't know if this is a kind of ridiculous suggestion, but could boarding be part of a state school facility there?
Louise Martin: 23:12
was many in rural Australia. There were many hostels. Kids that come in from out on the properties and stay in privately run hostels and board there through the week and attend the local state school. They have closed down over the years. Our population has decreased. They've become unviable in many cases. There's very few of those left. Queensland has three in addition to that. Queensland and I'm talking Queensland because that's where I live, though I am representing all of all Australian families there's only three state-run boarding facilities. One is in Weipa, which is exclusive for Indigenous kids. There's one in Mount Isa and one further in southeast, which in total would cater for 300 kids. We've got over a thousand kids accessing boarding. So that's an option. We have lobbied for that, but that doesn't seem to be going very far either.
Kirsten Diprose: 24:15
Really, it probably makes more economic sense for the government to increase your boarding allowance than open up a whole heap of boarding facilities under the state system. That's going to cost them so much money across Australia to do that.
Louise Martin: 24:28
Yes, we have figures that prove that the increase to the AIC and the total amount that would come to is actually less than what it costs to educate a high school student in a public school in remote areas. So I'll rest my case, your Honour. I say that unfortunately, they are not listening to us at this moment in time. Our current feedback is that the federal government doesn't want to be seen for the welfare budget to be blowing out, even though the increase that we're looking for $16 million annually does seem like a lot of money to Joe Blow, but that's in fact just a teeny, tiny drop in the ocean of the welfare budget. I noticed that now Benesi is pledging a billion dollars to make public education totally free in the Northern Territory, and all we want is $16 million annually, which would have such a massive positive effect for about the 4,000 kids who access AOC across Australia.
Kirsten Diprose: 25:38
Are families struggling to send their kids to school at the moment?
Louise Martin: 25:41
Yes, they are In rural and remote areas, mostly in primary production. Primary production we're price takers. Always we have to meet the market. Consumer expectation is becoming higher and higher for primary producers to produce, continually improve the product that they're providing, be it grain, beef, wool, what have you? The consumer is expecting more and more of us, and changes come slowly in primary production. We can't suddenly whip up a product to meet their expectations overnight.
Louise Martin: 26:20
As a result of that, our costs of inputs continue to rise. We have to do more certifications. Everything that we're doing is costing money, but as price takers we are at the mercy of the market. For example, last year I sold small sheep for $100 a head. This year they were $30 a head, which is really below the cost of production, in my opinion. And there we are still needing us as primary producers to send our kids to school, to access education, and that flows into our small towns where they're all the service providers that support the agricultural industry. It's having a massive impact on our whole communities, not just those. Families are leaving in droves.
Kirsten Diprose: 27:12
And when you frame it like that so you think, okay, 4,000 kids across the country, but if push comes to shove and you have to move because you can't afford to send your kids to school that way, then, yeah, entire communities close. Rural communities are dependent very largely on the agricultural community. That's right.
Louise Martin: 27:34
So for example this is my one example Bullier is a town in far western Queensland. It's 400 kilometres to the nearest high school. If those families who live in the town, in the community as a wage earner, as a salary earner, you cannot afford boarding school because you're looking at least $20,000 to $30,000 out of pocket per child per year. If you've got three or four kids that amounts to a lot of money quickly. So if you're even earning $150,000 a year a good salary earner, you still cannot afford boarding school and you meet criteria that your income's too high. Suddenly that family leaves. That family could be the local government employee, could be the teacher aide at the school. There could be three or four kids and when they leave you've lost another few kids out of the school. The local government has to find a new and train a new employee and the school's lost a staff member and it's all of that sort of thing that compounds the whole issue of being able to access education.
Louise Martin: 28:48
How did you meet your husband? I married the man next door. He's actually pre-loved when I first I grew up here and then I went away for a long time and came back to Tambo as an adult and I was working on this sheep stud just out of town as an adult. And I was working on this sheep stud just out of town and my husband at the time was still married to his former wife and he's got two beautiful children from there and I was there for 10 years before his marriage ultimately ended and about four years later, on an election night, suddenly we got together. So we're quite older parents. I was 40 when my twins were born and my husband was 50. So I don't think he ever expected that he'd be pulling on parenthood again and I don't think his children actually thought they were going to be pulling on being siblings again either. So it was quite a weird time. Suddenly there's these twins and oh my God, that was a tough run with twins.
Kirsten Diprose: 29:49
Oh dear, what a change that must have been. I always think having a child later in life must be such an incredible switch. I found the change really hard at 29 when I had my first child. I can't imagine being 40 and then being given not just one but two.
Louise Martin: 30:11
I actually thought my life was over there for a while. I had been very independent for a long time, very independent and just run my own show, didn't even think I was going to get married. Got married at 39, twins at 40. What a culture shock and a shock to the system. And I was actually just recently at the Motherland Conference in Launceston, which was enlightening for me. They talked about matrescence, which is a new word around town, about how you adapt from being your individual self to suddenly trying not to lose that identity but still undertaking motherhood, which is the most important job on the planet, and it was like a light bulb moment really. I thought, oh man, that was me. Suddenly, who am I? And the conflict between wanting to be the old me and then twins. Oh my god, I think I've just blocked out the first three years. I think it was just so intense, so blessed to have them in my life and yeah, and to be honest.
Louise Martin: 31:10
We had two sensational girls who were with us during those first three years. We had one girl who married a local bloke and actually and she's still part of our family and she came when they were six weeks old and stayed until she had her first baby about 18 months later. And then we had this other gorgeous girl from South Australia, chels, who was with us until they started school and she taught them, governessed them, and it was. I couldn't have done it without them. Now they're finished schools, oh my.
Kirsten Diprose: 31:45
God, it's a new phase for everyone. I suppose the one good thing about not having two daughters in year 12 would be the bank balance. Usually it's tiered on the age group, so you'd had two in year 12 at the highest cost. How did you go?
Louise Martin: 32:02
financially it was a struggle and my bank manager, who we were talking to the other day, said, oh, you don't have those boarding school fees anymore. And I said no, and we all had a collective sigh of relief because, honestly, with yes, as I said, we were looking at about $30,000 out of pocket per child per year. About $30,000 out of pocket per child per year. And that was before we even left the home, got there, bought a uniform, bought the laptop, did any extracurricular activities, et cetera. So realistically, you're looking about probably $40,000. So that's $80,000 for the two of them per year.
Louise Martin: 32:48
And when I looked at the school fees for my school this year, it hit $50,000 all up. I thought, oh man, geez, I'm glad I don't have that struggle anymore, but you make it work. You make it work, you sacrifice a lot. Our farm debt is more expansive as a result, because that's how, if you have that capital asset, you can draw on that and that is often the only way that rural families can afford it, which can make it happen, whereas if you're the salary earner in a small town, it's almost impossible unless you have some other, not off-farm but other assets that you can draw against.
Kirsten Diprose: 33:35
That's the challenge I think it's really worthwhile talking about that because again it can come down to this class thing of you're a wealthy landowner, you can afford it and, yes, it's made possible for you because of being able to draw down on the asset, probably more than having necessarily that available income from coming in from the produce that you sell. But it's because there are so many kids who say, live in the city, whose parents would never be able to afford boarding school, no matter what they did.
Louise Martin: 34:10
That's right. That's right. And people who live in the country, no matter what they did, they couldn't afford boarding school, which is why they leave. If you live in the city, though, you have other choices. You have many choices. You have many choices.
Louise Martin: 34:27
You go to there's public schools who offer excellent education and should never be dismissed, with many students with a wide range of curriculum options in a big public school in the city. So they are not deprived of an education at all, and if people in the city choose to drive past a public school and go to a private school, that's their choice. They have a choice. They've probably got 10 schools that they could choose from. When you live out here, you absolutely have no choice, unless there is one other choice, and that's to do school of distance education, which does go to year 12.
Louise Martin: 35:01
In many cases, where you're looking at a child who's already been most likely been doing distance ed till the end of year six, they're living at home. They've got a couple of siblings, that's all I know. They will go to interact with other students at many schools and whatnot once a term, perhaps, maybe twice if they're lucky. So they're leading a very lonely life, and school of distance education is a fabulous primary education. It is amazing, and often, when those kids go on to high school and boarding school, they can be well ahead of contemporaries with their learning, et cetera.
Kirsten Diprose: 35:45
When you get to high school age, though, kids need so much more they don't want to hang around with their mum and dad all the time, and that's a normal thing they're meant to be. Growing their independence, their social groups become so much more important to them, and that's just natural. I think it's cruel to keep kids. It's a horrible thing to say, maybe, but I just I can't imagine distance educating teenagers. Some look there'll be a handful of kids that would like it and thrive in that, but I think most really it's a disservice to them.
Louise Martin: 36:18
Totally. We are a social animal as a human and we need social interaction with our peers. It's very hard to develop as an individual without that and to explore life. It's such a narrow window of life if you don't have an opportunity to see what's out there.
Kirsten Diprose: 36:38
So one final bid to the government. How would you phrase the problem, the issue, and then what is the government? How would you phrase the problem, the issue, and then what is the solution?
Louise Martin: 36:48
The ultimate solution is to enable families to stay in their community, stay in their work in their community, enabling those kids to go away to access education, and the positive results from that is that those kids will may well come home and they will be educated back to their communities, lifting the community aspirations educational level. Because the low socioeconomic cycle in small towns is pretty critical and that's not exclusive to Indigenous families, it's right across the board. It doesn't matter what sector of the population you are in. Low socioeconomic outcomes are high. So if those families are able to stay and have their kids educated, it breaks that cycle, starts to break that cycle and that whole community far more viable and vibrant going forward. That's the goal to have our families stay in the community, the kids get educated, they come home educated, building community capacity that's it for this week's episode of Ducks on the Pond.
Kirsten Diprose: 38:07
Thank you to Alana Moller and Louise Martin for being so open and honest in sharing your stories. I'm sure there are a lot of people listening that can relate as well as quite a few of us, who have learnt a great deal about the complexity of this topic. If you'd like to check out the Isolated Children's and Parents Association complexity of this topic, if you'd like to check out the Isolated Children's and Parents Association, you can head to their website and maybe find a chapter near you as well. Also, a reminder to follow the Rural Podcasting Co on Instagram. There you'll find links and updates for Ducks on the Pond, as well as for our two other projects, two Smart Blondes and Town Criers.
Kirsten Diprose: 38:43
I also help people make podcasts. If that's something you're interested in, then let me help you tell your own story. Thank you so much to our sponsor for this entire series. Buy CC Fine Jewellery. Head to their website to check out their beautiful designs, all made from Australian gold and made with rural women in mind too. They also have a really lovely Instagram account. Thank you, as always, for listening. I will speak to you again soon.