Northern Territory’s education policy hands remote Indigenous students an impossible dilemma

Teens face the choice of a distant boarding school or staying on country without access to secondary curriculum

Trent is from a community of 400 people in the Top End. Arrive by road and the first thing you see is the red dust air strip, but closer to home, great spreading trees create oases of cool in the tropical heat. Under them, ceremonies are planned, card games played, yarns shared.

Trent didn’t leave his community because he wanted to. On the contrary. He went to boarding school because he, his mum and his nana value education and because he had no alternative. After a year, the Indigenous student coordinator at his school 4,000kms to the south described him as acutely homesick.

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