‘Academically vulnerable’: transient students falling through the system, principal warns

Harbouring a strong suspicion that current policies to counter academic disadvantage in schools are falling well short, the associate principal from Bentley Primary School has embarked on a PhD to identify those factors that are most predictive of – and protective against – poorer life outcomes.

“It’s frustrating to me that we don’t recognise and put more resourcing into our early childhood years and primary school years, because I see some of those kids progress through school, and due to factors that are beyond their control, they end up on pathways that aren’t necessarily leading them to positive life courses,” Gannon tells EducationHQ.

“[This research is] a labour of love and born of a passionate desire for advocacy [and] change for children who are vulnerable.”

Gannon has most recently honed in on how student mobility, that is the number of times students change schools, might impact on both academic outcomes and behaviour.

Research shows mobile students are overwhelmingly from disadvantaged families and minority populations, with Indigenous students also more likely to move schools frequently than their non-Indigenous peers.

Bentley Primary experiences a high rate of student transiency, with students flowing in and out of the school on the regular. Exact student numbers are in a constant state of flux.

 In 2016, the school clocked up a 90 per cent transiency rate, but this usually sits at around 50-60 per cent, Gannon says.

“That’s for a combination of reasons. One of them is we’ve got some state housing in our catchment area, and we’ve got a women’s refuge.

“We’ve got about 310 kids at the moment, and about 60 of those are Indigenous, and some of our Indigenous kids move from regional and remote WA back down to Perth, and then back out again…

“Stuff happens in [their home] community and they’ve got to go back, or mum gets tired of the goings-on in the community, so she wants to get out…” Gannon explains.

Hitting the data, the school leader led an analysis looking at NAPLAN participation and scores for the state’s public school students who completed Year 6 between 2016 and 2019.

The study found the odds of participating in the standardised test were significantly lower for students with high mobility.

This cohort also achieved significantly lower scores, on average, in literacy and numeracy at Year 3 and Year 5 compared with their peers.

Gannon says the findings really confirmed her take on the relationship at play here.

“[It] makes sense, because those kids are missing out on chunks of the curriculum.

“And those mean differences were enough to change the band that those kids were in, or even to put them below the national minimum standard when they would have otherwise been above.

“It’s evidence to us that mobility does impact students’ academic outcomes,” she notes.

Jacqueline Gannon says her school welcomes mobile students, some of whom haven’t been assessed for a number of years. “We know that they’re academically vulnerable, but that’s not documented anywhere,” she says. 

The educator has seen first-hand how skipping NAPLAN can layer a further disadvantage upon mobile students.

“It provides a secondary academic check-in for kids who are moving frequently,” she says.

“When I look at kids who come into our school who’ve been in a number of different schools, it’s often the case that they don’t have report grades – they haven’t been in schools long enough for the teachers to make valid judgments about their academic levels.

“So, we’ve got some kids who just haven’t been assessed for a number of years … we know that they’re academically vulnerable, but that’s not documented anywhere.”

Another problem is the fact that WA’s school funding model is contingent on NAPLAN participation, with students who sit in the bottom 10 per cent nationally attracting additional funding, Gannon flags.

“When schools like ours have substantial numbers of kids who don’t sit NAPLAN, it’s problematic, because the funding that’s specifically targeted to address those children never gets into the schools’ budgets,” she adds.

On the behaviour front, the study found no evidence of a link between students with high mobility and poor behaviour, which was measured via school suspensions data.

This came as a surprise, Gannon says, at least until they burrowed down into the literature around it.

“Suspensions have been shown with previous studies to be correlated with student mobility, but that wasn’t the case for us.”

As the learning gap widens for mobile students, so does absenteeism, truancy and school refusal.

“It may be that those kids aren’t in school enough to build up to a point where their behaviour is extreme enough for them to be suspended,” Gannon reflects.

“Another possible reason could be that that kids just become passively disengaged, so their behaviours are passively defiant, or passively disengaged, rather (than say) throwing things around or being physically aggressive with other kids or other teachers.”

The incredible work of some schools to cater to mobile students could also be a contributing factor, the school leader points out.

“We’ve got a staff that are very aware of the trauma that often accompanies high student mobility [and so they] are very good at managing kids’ behaviour and very good at connecting with kids, which is really, really important to keep them in school and (have any) behaviour issues reduced.

Gannon believes there ought to be more robust systems and processes in place for all schools to better assist transient students and their families.

For those children who come to Bentley Primary with nothing, teachers work away ‘seamlessly’ behind the scenes to ensure it’s no big deal, the principal reports.

“If kids need lunches, if they need uniforms, we just give them ... we absorb that cost.

“If we have swimming lessons and kids can’t pay, if we have excursions and kids can’t pay, we just let them go.

“We have an Aboriginal education officer who’s been going around to people’s houses at the moment, giving families support to enrol their kids in high school, so helping them fill in the paperwork, getting forms filled in for camp.

“So, our staff are really good at accommodating those kinds of issues with kids who move frequently, because those kids always look a little bit ‘deer in the headlights’ when they first come in.

“It’s hard socially and emotionally – and it’s hard academically.”