More than 4000 Indigenous Australian students enrol and take up a placement at boarding school each year. While reasons for attending boarding school vary, the impetus for many remote and very remote-dwelling students is restricted secondary educational opportunities in their home communities. A large multi-site study is being undertaken across Queensland to understand the conditions required for these students to be resilient while studying away from home. This paper reports on levels of student satisfaction with Queensland Department of Education's Transition Support Service (TSS) that provide assistance to remote-dwelling Indigenous students in the transition to boarding schools. A survey instrument administered to students included 22 close-ended questions to elicit levels of student satisfaction with TSS. Data were collected electronically using SurveyMonkey™ and analysed in SPSS v24. Descriptive statistics were calculated for variables assessing service support, student perceptions and experiences. A total of 294 primary, secondary and re-engaging students across 21 sites responded. Nearly all primary students (97%) anticipated that TSS would assist their move to boarding school. All secondary students identified that TSS had assisted their transition to boarding school. All re-engaging students agreed that TSS support had increased their capacity to cope when things go wrong. Lower scores related to students’ ability to access TSS when needed. Very high levels of satisfaction with TSS were countered by constraints of distance between TSS and students, and resources available to support the work of TSS. Findings point to the need for equitable provision of transition services in Queensland that emphasise the importance of relationship between service provider and student, and can inform the design of similar transition services across Australia.

This paper explores the transitional experiences and challenges faced by girls from the Torres Strait Islands when they leave individual communities to attend boarding school in regional Queensland. The paper presents original ethnographic research using a narrative enquiry approach, capturing stories as narrated by a broad cohort of girls from within these communities, both past and present students. The stories relayed in this article are integral to assisting parents and extended family, staff and administrators to better manage the transition process from one community to another. Identifying the cultural, social and academic challenges associated with the transition process will enable those involved in student support both within the community and the school system to do so with an enhanced awareness so that the students involved may be helped to negotiate this experience more easily. This paper will also inform, although not directly engaging with the topic, the ongoing debate about the advantages and disadvantages of girls leaving their communities to attend boarding school. It will also add weight to the call to improve current strategies to assist with the transition process.

In the last years of Idi Amin’s reign, modern dance was introduced at Namasagali College, a Catholic boarding school in rural Uganda, as a means of encouraging modern, liberal self-awareness in students. Drawing on interviews with Namasagali’s former headmaster, teachers, and students, this article offers the first scholarly consideration of this important school, and contextualizes its modern dance curriculum within Africa’s historical modernity/modernization problematic. The school’s progressive educational program, with its focus on creative exploration and ownership of the body, was framed within a neocolonial regimen of discipline and punishment that aimed to drill modern behavior into students. In its clashing modes of government, this school exhibited contradictions that have perennially troubled Western liberal intervention in Africa.

This study explored the experience of having a child educated away from home at boarding school for Aboriginal parents living in regional and remote communities in Western Australia (WA). In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 participants and thematic analysis found the following major themes emerged from the data: (1) Access, Standards and Quality, and the subthemes of Declining Local Schools, Opportunity, and Worldliness; (2) Parental Agency and the subthemes of Parent-School Connection, Parenting Style, Communication, and Milestones and Siblings and; (3) Cultural Heritage and the subtheme of Maintenance and Transmission. The findings are described and then discussed in terms of practice implications relevant to boarding schools in WA. Limitations of the current study are acknowledged and directions for future research are proposed.

This study explored the experiences of 32 male Aboriginal students from regional and remote towns and communities while they attended a metropolitan boarding school away from home and family in Perth, Western Australia. Using narrative interviews it specifically investigated how these Aboriginal students construct meaning around the transition experience to boarding school. Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) Decision Making and the subthemes of Choice-less Choice and Opportunity; (2) Organisational Climate and the subthemes of School Environment and Belonging, Culture Shock, Homesickness, Identity, Code Switching, Teachers, Academic Expectations, Residential Life, and Friendships and Peer Relations; and (3) Relational Change and the subthemes of Family Dynamics, Friendships at Home, and Cultural Connectedness. This study emphasises the importance of conceptualising and understanding social phenomena from the perspective of those who actually undertake the experience, and the findings are discussed in terms of policy and practice relevant to Australian boarding schools.

This is a reflective paper grounded in practice. It addresses the nature of working alliances in education between colleagues from different cultural, professional and generational backgrounds. The authors are specifically concerned with discussing the significance of accessing peer/cultural support in education, in particular how one colleague mentored another and the way knowledge was exchanged during this process to increase awareness and understanding. This topic is considered in the context of supporting male Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students while they study and live away from home to complete their secondary school education at boarding school in Western Australia (WA).