The Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS): Why invest in a strategy that reduces attendance?

Oct 15, 2026

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Examines Australia’s Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS), announced in 2013 to raise attendance in remote community schools by employing local people and supporting parents. After an early increase, average attendance in RSAS schools has declined since 2016 to more than eight percentage points below the start. Using My School data for Very Remote Aboriginal schools, the analysis compares RSAS outcomes with non-RSAS schools and interrogates why the government continues funding. It critically reviews 36 policy-related documents, then raises ethical and accountability concerns due to lack of attendance improvement and potential harm to First Nations students.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages22

Reading Time55 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Positionality

Context and background to the RSAS

RSAS outcomes and comparison with non-RSAS schools

Policy document analysis and ideological clues

Ethical and accountability concerns

The Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS): Why invest in a strategy that reduces attendance? John Guenther1, Samuel Osborne2, Steve Corrie3, Lester-Irabinna Rigney2 and Kevin Lowe4 1 Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, PO Box 2363, Parap, Northern Territory, 0804, Australia, [email: john.guenther@batchelor.edu.au](email: john.guenther@batchelor.edu.au) 2 UniSA Education Futures, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes Campus, South Australia, 5095, Australia 3 College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University, South Australia, 5042, Australia 4 School of Education, University of New South Wales, Kensington, New South Wales, 1466, Australia In late 2013, under the leadership of Prime Minister Abbott, the Australian Government announced anew policy designed to increase attendance rates in remote community schools—the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS) . The model assumed that employing local people in the program, which was designed to support parents get their children to school, would yield significant improvements and consequently improve educational outcomes. After a slight initial increase in school attendance rates, RSAS schools have seen average attendance rates decline since 2016, which now stand more than eight percentage points lower than at commencement. This article analyses My School data for Very Remote Aboriginal schools, showing how the RSAS school attendance results compare with similar non-RSAS schools. We question why the Australian Government continues to invest in a program that is not meeting its objectives, asking, what went wrong?. We do this by critically analysing 36 policy-related documents, looking for ideological clues that show why the government continues to invest in the program and how it sees it as “successful”. We conclude by raising ethical and accountability concerns about the RSAS, which lacks evidence of attendance improvement, and which potentially causes harm to its objects: First Nations students. Keywords: attendance, remote education, policy interventions, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, success Introduction Despite Aboriginal school attendance being a long-term problem needing to be solved, the reasons for non-attendance are “complex and contextual”(Armstrong & Buckley, 2011, p. 64) with several factors working together to reduce the likelihood of regular attendance (Prout-Quicke & Biddle, 2017) . The context that Prout-Quicke and Biddle refer to is one where students do not speak English as their first language, where the history of schooling is relatively recent, and where traditional cultural values and ways of being underpin community life. Remote Aboriginal education has historically been viewed through lenses of issues, concerns and perceived deficits. In the 1980s and 1990s these concerns were couched in discourses of access (Yunupingu, 1995), equity (Aboriginal Education Policy Task Force, 1988) and participation (Harris, 1990) . In the 2000s, outcomes emerged as a primary concern in policy documents (Boughton, 2001; Northern Territory Department of Education, 1999) along with data quality (Armstrong & Buckley, 2011; Gray & Partington, 2012) . Outcomes did not figure as strongly in Wilson’s (2014) Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory, except in its explicit mention of literacy; what did figure strongly in Wilson’s report was a concern about attendance. Attendance was linked to literacy and numeracy outcomes and was seen to be a reason for the failure of Indigenous education in remote Northern Territory schools. Attendance targets were not in the original measures of the Closing the Gap initiatives (Council of Australian Governments, 2009), but were added in 2015 (Australian Government, 2015a) . The target set was to “close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school attendance within five years”(Australian Government, 2015a, p. 5) . According to the 2018 Operati

FAQs

What is the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS) and when was it announced?

RSAS was announced by the Australian Government in late 2013 to increase attendance rates in remote community schools.

How have RSAS school attendance rates changed since the program began?

After a slight initial increase, RSAS schools’ average attendance rates declined since 2016, now standing more than eight percentage points lower than at commencement.

How does the article evaluate whether RSAS is meeting its objectives?

It analyzes My School data for Very Remote Aboriginal schools, compares RSAS attendance with similar non-RSAS schools, and critically reviews 36 policy-related documents to identify ideological clues.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by Kurz