This research explores school attendance rates within the steadily growing population of Victorian urban Indigenous students and challenges for realising high attendance levels. Poverty, pervasive throughout the urban Indigenous community, presents circumstances where it once, and could still, erode regular school attendance. We report one socio-educationally disadvantaged school, teaching a significant Indigenous student population that has mitigated the influence of socio-economic disadvantage. Their Indigenous students' attendance surpasses the attendance of most Indigenous students and almost matches that of their non-Indigenous school peers. Success has been achieved through community partnerships, supported by a Koorie 1 Education Worker, and embedded Indigenous culture. However, in the final primary school year, Indigenous students' attendance declines. This signals an earlier commencement of attendance decline that occurs in later years, often resulting in early attrition. As the school's targeted strategies and programmes have improved all students' attendance, so the attendance gap for Indigenous students persists.
Urban Indigenous students' school attendance and factors contributing to annual attendance rates are relatively unknown, and yet almost 80% of the Indigenous population resides in nonremote regions. Our longitudinal study evaluated an urban primary school where Indigenous families preferentially enrolled their children because they recognised it supported their children in ways that celebrated Indigenous culture and ameliorated school-related symptoms of poverty. Indigenous students' attendance influences appeared in phases: Indigenous status, poverty, and family characteristics, until significant influences for attendance were exhausted. While Indigenous students' mean attendance rates were bounded between 80% and 90%, and below non-Indigenous peers' attendance in each year, slight improvement occurred, even as poverty universally pervaded the Indigenous community. As poverty among non-Indigenous students increased, their mean attendance also declined below the 90% national benchmark.
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