New school order

A proposed Aboriginal school in Redfern is showing that Sydney Anglicans could help bridge the gap between the education "haves' and "have nots'. JEREMY HALCROW and MADELEINE COLLINS investigate the implications for how all Anglican schools are run.

Faith Landy-Ariel is working harder than most parents to give her children a decent start at life. This single mum of five boys is also battling the reality of a massive education divide in Australia that middle-class parents don't see " all because she is Aboriginal.

Faith, who is a committed Christian and actively involved at her local inner city church, has seen local children become drug addicts. She speaks of the knives, drugs and gang violence in the playgrounds.

Most of all she despairs at the low retention rates at school for indigenous youth " where less than one-third of Aboriginal students are finishing secondary school compared to 70 per cent of the general population; where local children get to Years 8 and 9 and can barely read.

Can Sydney Anglicans share their vast school resources with mums like Faith?

St Andrew's Cathedral School (SACS) and the Anglican parish of South Sydney are showing the way, with plans to build a high school for up to 50 Aboriginal children in either Redfern or Waterloo.

According to the Head of School, Phillip Heath, he will only support the school if it is solidly Christian, and has been liaising with local Aboriginal Anglican pastor, Ray Minniecon, for the past 12 months.

Mr Minniecon says locals are voicing some concern, which is healthy, because "at least they're thinking about it'. "We have challenges before us and hurdles we have to jump over to get to our final destination," he said, adding that work needs to be done to have conversations with local parents about the school.

Racism?

For Ray Minniecon the SACS proposal has been a ray of light after years of frustration. He certainly believes the wider Church has failed to do enough to help their Aboriginal Christian brothers and sisters.

"Our kids want to go to university, to get an education " there is an incredible desire to better themselves. It's not a level playing field " there's a huge lack of resources," he says.

The experiences of Christian Aboriginal parents like Faith are the tip of the iceberg and are mirrored in Sydney's African refugee communities.

There are more than 6,000 Sudanese refugees living in western Sydney, most of them Christians. The children usually have little or no education. School teachers are not trained to deal with victims of war, yet many of these children have lost family members and are seriously traumatised.

SC has been told some Sudanese want to pull their children out of Government schools because of cases of racial bullying and conflict, and place them in Christian schools which they cannot afford.

Unlike many such African refugees, Faith Landy-Ariel had the option of home schooling. The primary school teacher says home schooling became the only option for her oldest son, now 18 and an apprentice carpenter.

"When Nicholas went to kindergarten he went to a really frightening place."

"He's not a street kid," she explained, but he went into a "big and frightening world' and soon hooked up with the "worst kid in the class'.

So she took him out of school, and began teaching her other boys using a Brisbane-based Christian home schooling syllabus. "Home-schooling gets them away from all the yucky stuff that happens in schools," she said.

Nevertheless Faith dreams of getting her 12-year-old, Ben, into an Anglican high school. So far, she has had little success. Faith, in part, attributes her predicament to inherent racism.

The Rev Bernard Suwa, pastor of Blacktown's Anglican Sudanese Church, also admits some in his community "feel abandoned by their religious denomination, the Anglican Church', and are turning to the Roman Catholic Church and its systemic school system.

The Catholic Education Office has designed the Sudanese Pathways Project and runs "New Arrivals' classes especially for the refugees. Over 20 Sudanese adults were given scholarships to train as teachers at the Australian Catholic University (ACU). These adults are paid on part-time basis to work in Catholic schools, translating lessons and providing assistance to the students. With the Sudanese children also given free books and uniforms, the numbers enrolled in Sydney's Catholic schools have grown four-fold in two years.

So compared to the Catholics, are Sydney Anglicans failing their own? Can Anglican schools better share their vast educational resources with their less well-off brothers and sisters?

It is a question that troubled Phillip Heath of St Andrew's Cathedral School for some years when he thought about the nearby Aboriginal community in Redfern.

"Despite the enormous efforts of many people over a long time, the gulf between the outcomes of indigenous and non-indigenous children in the education system remains horrifying," he said.

Mr Heath was concerned about marching in "with arrogance to impose a model on others'. But after visiting a similar school in Johannesburg last year, the educator felt compelled to act.

"It may be the right time to consider a model where indigenous children in our own city are empowered and celebrated as the dominant culture and where we listen to the things they can teach us."

The search has begun to employ Aboriginal Christian teachers for the school and the hope is to also employ an Aboriginal principal.

Funding

It's not cheap to operate any school, so ongoing funding has always been a barrier to these kinds of initiatives. The Aboriginal school will need sponsorship at approximately $10,000 per student per year. The money must come from private sponsors, although Phillip Heath will also approach the Commonwealth.

Mr Heath says he has been surprised by the amount of "politics' around Aboriginal education, with the NSW Government saying it will not help him find a site for the school or in developing a syllabus.

Part of the problem in Australia is that the schools funding issue has been bogged down in political point-scoring. The Liberal Party have pitched themselves as the defenders of "choice' for parents, while Labor's rhetoric has been "equity', giving all children the same start in life.

However there are signs the education cold war is thawing, with the Federal Education minister Julie Bishop and her opposite number, Craig Emerson, discussing the merits of radical funding alternatives such as education vouchers and other needs-based approaches.

Indeed American Baptist theologian, Dr Ronald Sider argues that Christians should be advocating an education system that provides both equity and choice.

"Every child… should have full access to quality education so that he or she has the opportunity to realise God-given abilities. At the very least, therefore, schools for poor and minority children should have as much funding per student, as many qualified teachers and as good physical facilities as other schools," he said.

However Dr Sider said biblical principles also require that families be allowed to choose their school.

"Since [in the Bible] primary responsibility for nurturing children rests with the family, parents should be able to choose the kind of school they want for their children," he said.

The 19th century model of a non-sectarian education is no longer workable, when the school system has to reconcile the moral outlook of parents from radically different viewpoints.

"In an increasingly pluralistic society, it becomes harder and harder to define a common morality that all can accept," Dr Sider said. In this climate, poorer families can more clearly see how secular morals have weakened family structures and failed the children in their community.

"Small, faith-based schools with religiously motivated teachers are more likely to offer the special attention, loving intimacy and moral standards that an increasing number of dysfunctional homes cannot provide," Dr Sider says.

This point is reinforced by a plethora of research in the US and Australia that has shown that private Christian schools are more successful at educating disadvantaged children and they do so at less cost per student. The reason? Melbourne-based researchers found that when schools are integrated into a local "parish', the wider church community is better able to meet the needs of a disadvantaged family.

Dr Sider argues that to provide both "equity' and "choice' there is only one solution: a voucher system. The vouchers offer parents an "educational check' that could be cashed at any school, public or private. To enhance equity, the vouchers can be means-tested so that less well off families recieve more. This point is often ignored by left-wing, secular critics.

Funding concerns aside, Phillip Heath hopes the new Aboriginal school will get up and running by Term One, 2008. It is anticipated there will be a wiating list.