As Marrung: Aboriginal Education Plan 2016-2026 approaches its conclusion, and as Treaty, Yoorrook, Closing the Gap, and broader self-determination reforms continue to shape the policy landscape, there is an important question for school leaders: will this moment lead to genuine structural change, or simply another cycle of professional learning and policy language without meaningful shifts in accountability?
The Department’s investment in initiatives such as the Bringing Change Together: First Nations Learning Suite, informed by the Strengthening Aboriginal Self-Determination in Education Campfire Conversations and direct co-design with First Nations and departmental stakeholders, reflects an important recognition that schools need stronger cultural capability.
With more than 150 contributors helping shape the content, this work signals a genuine commitment to capability building.
But capability alone will not create change if leadership accountability remains unchanged.
Aboriginal education cannot continue to be treated as supplementary work delegated to Aboriginal staff, wellbeing teams, or individual champions. It must be recognised as core leadership business.
Too often, Aboriginal education in schools is still treated as something additional. Important, yes – but supplementary.
A week of activity during NAIDOC, A Reconciliation Week assembly, a passionate staff member carrying the work. A First Nations staff member expected to hold cultural safety for an entire school, educate colleagues, support Aboriginal students and families, respond to cultural matters, and absorb the emotional labour of navigating systemic racism within the very institutions they are often trying to reform.
Yet despite carrying this cultural and emotional labour, First Nations staff are too often absent from the very decision-making tables where priorities, policy, funding, and strategic directions are determined.
Asked to advise, educate, and support but not consistently empowered to shape structural reform. This reflects a deeper colonial pattern, where First Nations knowledge, culture, and labour are drawn upon to improve systems without a corresponding shift in power, accountability, or resourcing.
That is not leadership. It is the continuation of a colonial burden. Aboriginal education is not an optional extra. It is not the responsibility of Aboriginal staff or families alone – it is a leadership responsibility.
Meaningful change begins with leadership. When leaders make genuine commitments, shift power, resource this work appropriately, and embed accountability into the fabric of school culture, that change filters through every level of the organisation from policy to practice, from classrooms to wellbeing responses, from staff culture to student experience.
As a Yorta Yorta woman working in education, I see firsthand the difference leadership makes. I also see the harm when this work depends entirely on individual goodwill rather than embedded accountability.
Too often, whether an First Nation student experiences cultural safety, belonging, and meaningful support can depend less on system consistency and more on whether school leadership actively prioritises this work.
Some schools create environments where First Nations young people feel seen, safe, proud, connected to culture, and able to thrive.
Others continue to engage First Nation students primarily through a deficit lens through attendance concerns, behaviour incidents, wellbeing risk indicators, and vulnerability frameworks while overlooking strengths, resilience, identity, leadership, cultural connection, and the protective role culture plays in wellbeing and engagement.
Public reporting tells us this remains urgent. First Nation students’ sense of school connectedness declines sharply in secondary years, while attendance continues to be a persistent focus.
But if our primary response to these indicators is increased monitoring, compliance, or intervention without examining whether our systems are culturally safe, then we risk reinforcing the very disengagement we say we want to address.
Data matters. But what we choose to measure shapes the stories we tell.
If First Nation students are only visible through deficit data, then the responses we design will inevitably be deficit-based too.
We intervene on students instead of working with them. We ask why Aboriginal students are disengaged, instead of asking harder questions: Are our schools culturally safe? Do students feel seen, respected, and that they belong?
Too often, attendance becomes the metric we fixate on, when it may simply be the visible symptom of deeper barriers – racism, exclusion, cultural unsafety, unmet wellbeing needs, and a schooling system still shaped by a colonial lens that privileges Western norms while too often viewing First Nations ways of learning, knowing, relating, and being as something to accommodate rather than something of equal value.
That is not self-determination. That is still a system doing things to Aboriginal young people rather than with them.
Self-determination cannot remain language used in policy documents while decision-making power remains unchanged in practice.
Self-determination requires schools to shift power, resource appropriately, and move beyond deficitbased thinking toward genuine partnership and cultural accountability.
School leaders should be asking: Are Aboriginal students, families, and communities genuinely shaping decisions that affect them? Are our behaviour and wellbeing frameworks culturally responsive – or disproportionately punitive? Is culture recognised and valued as a protective factor, or only acknowledged symbolically? Is Aboriginal education embedded in leadership accountability, or delegated elsewhere? Can we clearly demonstrate how targeted Aboriginal education funding is being used to improve outcomes?
Accountability must also extend to resourcing. Funding allocated to improve outcomes for Aboriginal students should be transparent, purposeful, and clearly linked to impact not absorbed into broader budgets where its contribution becomes invisible.
Too often, cultural safety remains personality dependent. Outcomes for Aboriginal students can hinge on whether they happen to attend a school with a principal who understands this work or a staff member willing to carry it.
That is not equity. That is inconsistency. If cultural safety depends on having the “right” people, then it is not embedded – it is fragile.
This is not about blame. It is about leadership accountability.
The Department has also flagged consideration of legislative reform through review of the Education and Training Reform Act to strengthen First Nations recognition and self-determination.
If self-determination is to be embedded structurally, then schools cannot continue to treat Aboriginal education as optional goodwill or delegated cultural work.
Likewise, if Treaty is to have practical meaning in education, and if Yoorrook’s truth-telling is to lead to meaningful reform rather than acknowledgement alone, then schools must be willing to examine where power currently sits and what genuine partnership looks like.
If we are serious about this work being leadership business rather than optional professional curiosity, accountability mechanisms matter.
Housing Aboriginal education within advisory or supplementary structures alone risks positioning it as additional rather than expected core leadership work.
The next chapter of Aboriginal education in Victoria cannot simply be a refresh of language or another framework layered over unchanged systems. It must be about structural change.
That means embedding Aboriginal education in leadership accountability. Building whole-school cultural capability. Challenging deficit thinking in language, systems, and practice. Partnering genuinely with First Nations communities. Protecting targeted funding. Shifting power – not just language.
Aboriginal young people should not have to rely on luck to experience cultural safety, belonging, and opportunity at school. That should be the standard.
