A comprehensive brief on how the next Western Australian Government can lift its game in supporting the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal children is provided below.
The authors are Professor Cheryl Kickett-Tucker AM and colleagues who are chief investigators of the Moombaki Cultural Learnings Research Project.
Cheryl Kickett-Tucker, Jenny Dodd, Juli Coffin, Fiona Stanley, Donna Cross and Deborah Johnson write:
The key health priorities for the WA Government elected in the 2025 election must focus on actions that actively involve the Aboriginal community to address the physical, social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal children.
Most importantly, a future WA government must address the ‘elephant in the room’ that is the institutionalised racism experienced by Aboriginal children in classrooms, health services and in their daily lives.
Aboriginal children need to experience their daily lives at schools and in health, education and social support services free of discrimination and deficit stereotyping.
Educational attainment is a critical social determinant of health. Higher education results in Aboriginal people experiencing improved health outcomes throughout their life span.
Educational attainment also means families and children are more likely to live in (and afford) safe housing, access to health services and less likely to experience stress and anxiety associated with the pressures of everyday life.
The WA Aboriginal Health and Wellbeing Framework (2015-2030) requests that: “WA Health recognises racism as a key social determinant of health for Aboriginal people. Healthcare, whether government or community provided, is to be free of racism and discrimination.”
Aboriginal children need to be physically and psychologically healthy to maximise their schooling, and that in turn contributes toward improved health, social and emotional well-being including the prevention of suicide and self-harm of Aboriginal children.
WA Government strategy and policy – such as the WA Government Aboriginal Empowerment Strategy, Focus 25: Shaping the Future, and The Aboriginal Cultural Framework 2024-2034 – and national policies such as Closing the Gap repeatedly assert the need for Aboriginal-led responses to the health and education needs of Aboriginal children.
Support connection to culture
A future WA government needs to prioritise partnerships and joined up approaches when providing health and wellbeing support services for Aboriginal children.
This must include increased funding, resourcing and support for Aboriginal Indigenous Education Officers (AIEOs) who are well placed to identify potential health and wellbeing issues experienced by Aboriginal children.
AIEOs are the cultural brokers, the cultural mentors and the cultural ‘go to’ in schools. Importantly they possess the skills to ‘walk in two worlds,’ negotiating the nexus and overlaps of western and Indigenous worldviews in school settings. Connection to culture is crucial in providing Aboriginal children with protective practices and resources.
AIEOs play a critical role in the decolonisation of classroom spaces. AIEOs who are adequately funded and resourced can act as the bridge to appropriate health, social and emotional wellbeing and support services including ACCHS and other Aboriginal community groups.
Evidence shows there are long waiting lists for all children referred to child health services. Public paediatricians have wait lists reported of up to three years. Children with ADHD and Autism are waiting up to two years before being officially diagnosed.
The Opposition Alliance asserts that up to 10,000 children are waiting to see a paediatrician and 4,288 children are waiting to see a speech pathologist through the Metropolitan Child Development Service.
The Aboriginal Health Council of WA provided a report to the Government in 2024 addressing “unacceptable waiting times for child development services”. The CEO of a peak ACCHS asserted that up to 63 percent of Aboriginal children in Western Australia are not receiving the developmental support services they critically need before they start school.
Funding matters
The report emphasises that to encourage school engagement, prevent presentations at emergency and crisis services, it is essential for ACCHs and other Aboriginal community-based services to be funded and resourced sufficiently.
Take for instance the Koya Aboriginal Corporation, which has been in operation since 2004 in the City of Swan and City of Kwinana and services the highest population of Aboriginal people in the state. According to the North-East Metropolitan Education District Office, the City of Swan has the largest cohort of Aboriginal school children in the state.
Koya is a local, place-based Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation located in the heart of Midland established by a Stolen Generation member, late Mr Allan Kickett. His legacy ensures Aboriginal children are safe and secure, especially in their identity as Aboriginal people.
Koya compiled an indepth community profile of Aboriginal people in Swan called Weeip Maali Boodja, where high school students report:
“Our school needs an Aboriginal psychologist, like the one we have now where you can make an appointment every week or whenever you need one but the one now doesn’t really understand much. I was seeing him but wasn’t much help. The AIEO pointed me in the direction of an Aboriginal psychologist and it was better” (comment from a teenager).
Koya has also been operating a complementary service to primary schools called KAPSA (Koya Aboriginal Primary School Academies). The primary focus of the KAPSA program is to increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary school students’ school attendance, educational attainment, personal development, life skills, cultural knowledge and pride and health and wellbeing.
It aims to ensure children attend school consistently, develop their skills, knowledge and confidence, achieve their potential at all stages of their primary school age development, participate in sports and active recreation activities, transition successfully to secondary school and develop protective factors that can reduce the likelihood of contact with the criminal justice system.
Koya prioritises an Aboriginal-centred approach to holistic child wellbeing and works in collaboration with schools. This way of working is supported by the Select Committee into Child Development Services:
“We cannot look at health services in isolation. As my education colleagues have often said to me, ‘Why does health split children into mental health and physical health, and all these boxes, when education sees the whole child?’” (p 86)
And:
“The need for better collaboration with schools is recognised.” (p 85)
As reported in our research Moombaki Cultural Learnings, there is much more to do in the current school system. This research found resistance and a reluctance to “see” Aboriginal students as cultured, unique, and talented individuals.
In fact, we found Aboriginal students experienced daily deficit and negative stereotypes as well as blatant and “unseen” bias and racism from the very educators who are supposed to create a safe space for all to learn and grow.
The result is that the damage inflicted to young Aboriginal students’ mental health and holistic wellbeing has serious, entrenched, life-long repercussions.
The Balanginy research conducted by Koya, in partnership with the WA Department of Education, shows that working together can transform local challenges to promising proactive options for schools to journey toward culturally responsiveness. This is a commonality echoed by the Moombaki research and Weeip Maali Boodja.
Key takeaways
Future Western Australian governments must work toward actions that:
- Provide immediate increased funding that enables AIEOs (who are ideally placed) to work with Aboriginal children and their families to identify educational, health and social emotional wellbeing needs that ensure current ‘gaps’ are closed.
- Support and fund the infrastructure and system requirements for enabling local, grassroots Aboriginal people’s community involvement in decision making regarding the educational, health and social well-being needs of Aboriginal children across education, health and social and emotional wellbeing services. And act on these recommendations.
- Provide free and prioritised access to the range of paediatric, social and emotional health, and child-development support services identified and already reported as being needed by Aboriginal Community Controlled services, local, grassroots Aboriginal families and Aboriginal community.
- Mandate cultural responsiveness training for all educators and school leaders and ensure these are monitored, evaluated and linked to key performance indicators and school funding requirements.
- Collaborate with universities to ensure that cultural security training is a mandated component of teacher education programs.
• Details of references for this article are here.
Author details
The authors are the Chief Investigators of the Moombaki Cultural Learnings Research Project:
Professor Cheryl Kickett-Tucker AM is a Wadjuk Noongar woman and a Research Academic at Curtin University and Chair of Koya Aboriginal Corporation.
Dr Jenny Dodd is Research Associate in the School of Education at Curtin University.
Professor Juli Coffin, Ngangk Yira Institute for Change, Murdoch University
Professor Fiona Stanley AC is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia
Emeritus Professor Donna Cross OAM, UWA
Professor Deborah Johnson, Michigan State University, USA.
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