“That ICPA (Aust) requests the Minister for Education to continue the Commonwealth Regional Scholarship Program beyond the one-off 2024 pilot.”
The Commonwealth Regional Scholarship Program announcement came as welcome relief to struggling families across remote and very remote Australia whose only access to secondary education is boarding school. However, the relief was very short lived when families realised that it was a one-off program that provided a maximum of 70 scholarships only, once.
Our branch fails to see how you can effectively evaluate a program based on a one-off, very small number of participants. It appears more like a tokenistic gesture to silence a group of people and hose down media attention rather than actually providing effective assistance to bridge the ever-growing education gap.
If the government want families in remote and very remote Australia and they want the children to grow to become productive members of society then they must provide long term meaningful access and assistance to education for those families.
