Submission to the Independent Review into Regional, Rural and Remote Education, September 2017
Australia needs to improve the school outcomes of regional and rural students. Non-Indigenous students in regional areas are already three-to-six months behind their metropolitan peers by Year 3, and this gap roughly doubles by Year 9 for reading, and triples for numeracy. Remote and very remote Indigenous students can be up to six years behind the national average by Year 9. In this submission to an independent review of regional, rural and remote education, Grattan Institute School Education Program Director Peter Goss analyses the complex interaction between remoteness and indigeneity, and how it varies across the states and territories.