I am an Aboriginal educator based at the Swan Hill Technical School. I started work as an Aboriginal educator in the first term of school in 1982.

My duties involve liaising with Aboriginal students, parents, teachers and the community. I liaise with the students to find out if they have any problems at home or school. If they have problems we discuss them and think of ways to overcome them. I like to walk into classes such as Home Economics, and Woodwork – it is easy for them to talk and I don’t interrupt them too much. I also like to speak to the students out of class, usually in my office or in the school grounds.

It is twenty-five years since I left school. At the moment I’m doing an eighteen month training program to be an Addiction Worker. As part of the evaluation of the training program I have been asked to write down my thoughts and feelings about my training.

Some people involved in the program have suggested to me that teachers might be interested in my early childhood experiences – growing up on a reserve and going to an all Aboriginal school.

As I look at it now, I think that education is so important to Aboriginal people. I have one son attending primary school and one has just left high school. I hope my story will help teachers understand why it is hard sometimes for Aboriginal parents to communicate with them.

I was born in Kempsey and raised on Bellbrook Reserve. I lived there with my family (eight sisters and three brothers) and most of my aunts and uncles also lived there at that time. I had a good, happy upbringing, my family were all very close. In my school days my teachers were kind but didn’t really teach me much. A lot of what I’m learning now I should have learnt then. The teachers in those days were getting paid for doing nothing. That makes me angry now – the teachers, especially on the reserve (unless the government had a policy not to teach us) didn’t think it was worth teaching Aboriginal kids.

The teacher on the reserve was also the manager, and his wife the matron. They didn’t want to let us learn anything – we had to do everything for them (washing, cleaning, carting wood) but they never wanted to show us how to do things for ourselves.

In this article I would like to question one of the explanations offered to help account for the relatively low academic achievement of Aboriginal pupils, namely that they are handicapped by negative self-concepts. The connection between self-concept and school success itself seems plausible enough. For instance, students with negative self-concepts may tend to adopt low occupational horizons which, in turn, can undermine one type of motivation for academic achievement. Similarly, if pupils perceive schooling as a race then lack of self-confidence could lead them to take the attitude, “Why bother, I’m not good enough to win a place to university anyway.” Moreover, as Jackson (1960) points out, classrooms are very judgmental places where the behaviour and work of children is constantly evaluated by teachers and peers. As a result in many learning situations the student “is risking error, judgment, disapproval, censure, rejection and, in extreme cases, even punishment” (Canfield and Wells, 1976:7). If insecure and defensive, pupils may find such an atmosphere very threatening and consequently be inhibited by a fear of failure. Also, it may be suggested, unless children are self-sufficient they may experience difficulty coping with cold, distant, formal teacher-pupil relationships.

What is more open to dispute, however, is whether or not Aboriginal children have negative self-concepts. Fanshawe (1976) observes that there is insufficient experimental data to enable this issue to be resolved conclusively on empirical grounds. And within the literature on the education of socially disadvantaged children there are opposing views that can be related to differences in ideology.

This report is a limited evaluation of the Tutorial Assistance program within the Aboriginal Secondary Grants Scheme.

Achievement of Aboriginal secondary students receiving tuition was analysed according to several criteria, including sex and the type of school attended. The major findings were:

• Tutored Aboriginal students had significantly higher achievement than untutored students, in both English and Mathematics.

• Aboriginal students in boarding schools had significantly higher achievement than those in state schools, regardless of tutoring.

• There were no significant differences between male and female students.

It could not be concluded that tutorial assistance caused the superior performance of tutored students. Student motivation was a highly possible intervening factor, and there are probably many others.

In addition, various solutions to the problem of underachievement by Aboriginal students were ranked according to their effectiveness as perceived by people in the tutorial program. Three solutions were judged equally preferable and viable:

• Employing more Aboriginal teachers, aides and counsellors.

• Providing tutorial assistance to Aboriginal students.

• Sensitising non-Aboriginal teachers to the problems faced by Aboriginal students.