 I'd like to thank the Freilich Foundation for inviting me here tonight to deliver the 2015 Herbert and Valme Freilich Foundation lecture in Bigotry and Tolerance and it's been a great pleasure this evening to meet Valme and to see such a generous benefactress of this foundation. I'm going to start by acknowledging the original owners of this land and paying my respects to elders of past and present and to any Aboriginal people here today. I don't do that because it's now a form that people follow. I do it because of my deep sorrow that still 48 years after we extended civil rights to Aborigines, their plight is a dreadful one. Because I'm a teacher my focus is education. My work as a teacher has largely been with disadvantaged communities and for the last decade in particular a little bit more than that with young refugees and asylum seekers. This evening I'm going to explore some of the human rights issues that I see as critical to Australian education currently and I'm going to start with social justice and equity as they apply to education and particularly to the education of disadvantaged young people. Social justice isn't a new concept, but certainly around when I started teaching in the mid-1960s. It's been part of the context of schooling in this country and I guess in the US where we took some of those ideas for over 50 years. It fits very neatly with our idea of ourselves as an egalitarian and fair society. What we haven't talked about as much and I think we need to do so urgently now in Australia are human rights and not only in relation to education, a very bleak situation at the moment. For Australians the idea of a fair go is deeply embedded in the national psyche. For instance, I am an educator, the enactment in the late 19th century of legislation which made governments responsible for the provision of free, secular and compulsory school education for everyone was an essential part of that view. Australia led the world at that time in this sort of legislation as it did at Federation with universal suffrage for example, except for the Aborigines. It took another 65 years for Aboriginal Australians to gain civil rights. Fairness I would have to say has always been selective in Australia. By the 1970s of course there was recognition that not every student had the same opportunity for schooling and this led to the implementation of the disadvantaged schools program under the Whitlam government to address inequity in school education. That was the time also when governments started extending the high school to six years from five years and doing things of that kind. The discourse had changed to one of equity. The basic idea of fairness continues to influence thinking around equity as we saw in the recent Gonski recommendations for more equitable funding of schools and the 2007 Bradley Review of Tertiary Education which had a lot of implications for school practice as well as for university practice. Equity of course isn't the same as social justice. Equity suggests the reduction or removal of barriers that prevent equality of access to education. Social justice should be an outcome of that process. The reality is that we don't have an equitable education system and the experience and outcomes of education are quite different for young people of different social classes for Aboriginal students, for disabled students, for the mentally ill, refugees and asylum seekers and students in remote and rural areas. The level playing field is tilted towards the advantage, not the disadvantage and powerless and increasingly so. Children of course are by definition powerless. However, the education they receive is a major factor in their relative power as adults. That's what the DSP recognized, the Disadvantaged School Programme and the Gonski and Bradley reforms have sought to address both at a school level and at a tertiary level. The inequities in funding are more obvious now than half a century ago and have led to what's becoming a divisive two-tier schooling system, public and private. There's of course a hierarchy in both systems with a latent selective schools in more privileged areas at the top and schools that serve low socioeconomic status communities at the bottom. The majority of low socioeconomic status schools are public schools. Since the 1950s there's been a huge increase in government support for private schools and a commensurate growth in the number of private schools and the proportion of children educated in those schools. We're up to about 30% and there are so many OECD countries where it's a maximum of about 10%. There's no other country except Ireland which has such a high proportion of children in non-government schools. I don't know why we call them non-government schools since they're very lavishly funded by the state. For many people now education, public education has become the default position. So we're becoming residualised although we continue to educate the majority of children and of course almost all the disabled children, all the asylum seekers, most of the low SES and poor children and so on. The Gonski reforms were meant to address inequities in funding of schools and therefore address those social justice concerns which have the potential to undermine our society. The reforms will not be funded after 2017. The Abbott government cut off the last two years of funding there which means in three years time schools like mine may find themselves far short of the resources which we need to make a difference to the outcomes of our students. Like some of you I guess I watched the SPS documentary Struggle Street earlier this year. It just showed how blickly the people who were the subject of that documentary are how far they are from achieving any sort of equity. It was a very bleak view of the world, living right on the margins of society and struggling to keep some sort of dignity in their lives. And you could argue of course that the younger people portrayed in that documentary had gained precious little from their years of compulsory schooling. Very depressing and very accurate depiction of underclass people. At the time it ignited a fierce debate about media intrusion into people's lives. I've heard this described as poverty porn but in fact the documentary touched on a number of themes in Australian life that we're squeamish about discussing and very reluctant to remedy. Poverty and inequality, the impact of lack of education, racism, drug addiction, social alienation and so on, mental health I guess. I think we need to speak about these issues just as I think we need to shift the discourse from social justice which clearly is not a reality for many people in our community to one of human rights. Human rights are the principles, social justice is an outcome. You can't achieve social justice without a recognition of human rights. Right now in Australia I'd argue that human rights are under serious challenge. As we saw earlier this year from the government's attack on the Human Rights Commission following the publication of their report on children in immigration detention, the Forgotten Children and the treatment of asylum seekers both child and adult in breach of Australia's obligations under international law. The debate on Australia's treatment of asylum seekers continues to be one of the more divisive issues in our society and it continues on. Every day there's something new and something which I find quite appalling and which is completely outside the high ideals of those international agreements and we're signed all of them. In fact Australia helped to write many of them and so the irony in that is that I've read something today a friend of mine in French from a Le Monde newspaper which was talking about Nauru and Manus and speaking in very strong terms about how European nations have to resist using the Australian Pacific solution as a way forward for themselves when they are under much more siege from people fleeing the horrors of war and so on. So a fundamental human right is the right to an education and indeed human rights are fundamental to education in a democracy. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says in article 29B the education of the child should be directed to the development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is a relatively recent document ratified only in 1990 though there were previous declarations in 1924 under the League of Nations and then in 1959. Australia is a signatory as we are to every other human rights UN human rights convention. In 1997 just seven years after the Convention on the Rights of the Child came into force I heard the former president of the Irish Republic and then and first UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson given address at an international principles convention in Boston and she called which she called rights the fourth hour of schooling. I'm looking around here and I know that everybody here will know what I mean when I say well almost everybody the three hours. They were reading, writing and arithmetic. From the days when schooling meant elementary school the majority of Australian children left school at 14 or 15 with only basic literacy and numeracy skills. That's not such a long time ago. When I was at school only 15% of children completed high school. Most children had left school by the time they were 14 or 15 to enter the workforce of course they were jobs then for young people could I say. If you want to consider a genuine education revolution then the change from the early 1960s completion rates to our current school completion rates of over 85% is one such. However completion rates vary considerably from state to state and are aligned with factors such as socioeconomic status where you live and aboriginality. There was a 2013 University of Melbourne study that found that completion rates in the lowest SES quartile the bottom 25% were around 66%. The middle ranges 78% and the high socioeconomic status 90 plus percent. Aboriginal students according to the latest survey have a 52% completion rate and that's this year. Well we'll see. Students who fail to complete school generally have higher rates of unemployment and are more likely to be in low paying or casual jobs than their peers who stay on at school. Of course those are the jobs which are least likely to survive structural change. Low educational attainment and low expectations on the part of students themselves their parents their teachers our society as a whole play a major role in students not completing school. The recent extension of the school leaving age 17 hasn't actually markedly improved the situation in relation to that group of young people. Interesting of course the Melbourne study found that a positive school culture helps increase retention rates and influences post-secondary destination big surprise that one. This is certainly our experience at Holroyd High where the majority of students fall into the bottom two quartiles 57% of my students in the bottom quartile as against 25% for the general population. We have a high completion rate despite the mobility of what is a very recently arrived and impoverished school population and a very high rate of university uptake this year 58% from last year's HSC class compared to approximately 15% identified by Bradley for low SES and 30% for the whole population we were very pleased about that. We wait to see what happens this year I don't think it'll be 58% anyway the situation of course things aren't completely negative since we started to think seriously about equity a lot's been achieved not least the huge improvement in school completion rates we have a common curriculum at last well more or less agreed standards of teacher education and performance girls participation has improved markedly and indeed has overtaken that of boys and the majority of young people with disabilities are now educated in mainstream school settings however for others such as Aboriginal young people not much has happened not enough has happened despite substantial government investment over the last five decades for some groups in our society social justice remains elusive and while it remains so engagement and participation in society and let me say the energy and motivation to achieve a better life will simply not be there we saw that in Struggle Street normal employment for those who's fallen through the cracks because right now you need to be educated to get employment there are very few unskilled jobs left in our in our postmodernist society now I mentioned girls as major beneficiaries of the changes in education over the last 50 years more girls now complete school and boys for instance and about 55% of tertiary students are female the increase in university enrollments for both sexes has been quite dramatic now I was researching this because I went back to give a talk of my at my old school North Sydney girls high the old girls you know I think I left them in a state complete shock but anyway in 1911 when my mother was born there were just 2,465 students enrolled in Australian universities or 0.055% of a population of about 4 million people about 500 or 23% of those students were women when I started at the University of Sydney in 1961 there were 53,780 students at University in Australia or 0.54% of population we're creeping up of just over 10 million I was one of 12,395 female students still only 23% of enrollments as it let me say and of course that explains where I went to university released from a girl's school suddenly there were boys everywhere it was quite it was quite exciting last year in a population of about 24 million there were 1,313,776 students at university including 328,659 international students 25% of all enrollments 55% of students and now female well encouraging as those figures may may seem I don't think they're good enough in a post-industrial society Australia has declining performance on international test measures such as the year nine PISA tests and a widening equity gap it is one of the largest among OECD countries there's also a decline in performance of school children at the top end of the scale which is inhabited almost entirely by high SES students these are the students who will constitute the majority of the university enrollments into the foreseeable future despite the implementation of the Bradley reforms let me give you an example when Bradley identified identified these issues in 2007 7% of students at Sydney University were low SES and I said to someone at the university will turn that around when one of my students goes to Sydney University 93% of the students are not like her and and the problem the problem there is sometimes not the intellectual capacity is the social knowledge and understanding the inability to connect with people who all swish around the place knowing exactly what expected them nearly didn't and so she moved to another university I've got a I get a small number of students into Sydney but it's only a small number Bradley Bradley of course the Bradley reforms included uncapping enrollments what happened with uncapping enrollments more people have gone to university but the proportions or the proportion of low SES stayed roughly the same and so Sydney University in this time despite heroic efforts is still about 7.2 percent low SES though that that's a problem for us all it's problem for me it's in the university because I'm a fellow Senate and currently Pro Chancellor of the university and so it's something that concerns me very much we have a strong commitment to equity as to all of the universities but actually shifting shifting this this monster is is very hard I the increase in school retention rates also marks the lack of opportunity for employment and training for those young people who either don't wish to or not capable of continuing their formal education as recently reported unemployment among 15 to 19 year olds has risen to over 14 percent this is the group hardest hit by the federal government's decision to axe programs designed to to help them into employment though and chafe of course and I was just talking about this earlier chafe system has been gutted and so and and and as a consequence fees are going up there there's a raft of of small vocational training centers which are doing which only have I noticed a 10 percent completion rate but people are still having to pay hex type fees and so people who don't complete and who fail are still burdened with the debt afterwards a lot of poor kids just aren't going into tape and I don't know why any any reasonable government would dismantle a highly effective vocational alternative education system for for for the ideology of competition I think that seems very wasteful apart from anything else so learn or earn which is one of the mantras we we hear is actually a hollow one for young people with inadequate education few employment skills and no jobs to go to that's let's go back to rights I do this I could I'll just remind myself before I get carried away what I talk about human rights rather than the various iterations of the fair go the reason is that they are the foundation of our freedoms even though we lack a bill of rights in Australia to give full expression to them in law human rights have never been in more important than right now in our troubled world every time I open the papers I'm confronted with with evidence of the abuse of human rights somewhere or other the world is facing now a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions the ugly contemporary combination of wide-scale conflict and persecution has led to a dramatic increase in the last few years the displacement of people for the first time in 2014 there were more than 50 million people displaced in the world the latest estimates I've seen suggests that there are 59.5 million people displaced currently and additional 10.7 million people in 2013 alone I tried I went on the UNHCR website to have a look at these figures and of course they haven't they can't catch up it's it's dramatic shift in thing during 2013 an average of 32,200 people per day were forced from their homes more than 34,000 unaccompanied children became refugees in 2014 some of them are in my school of the almost 60 million displaced persons at least 18 million refugees that is displaced outside their country of origin about 40 million are internally displaced and something like 2 million people are wandering the world actively seeking asylum there were last year there were 1.7 million individual applications to the various international bodies for asylum 50% of all displaced persons are under 18 years of age the great majority of these people will never be resettled the great majority of those children will never have access to education asylum seekers will continue to come no matter how harsh our laws or how brutal our treatment of the people because those people have no alternative there's no orderly queue for resettlement and in fact Australia takes relatively few refugees on average less than 14,000 people per annum or about 0.25% of the world total of refugees who are resettled we currently have 35,582 people in the community on refugee visas not including asylum seekers who are not counted compare this figure to the 1.6 million refugees in Turkey 1.5 million in Pakistan 1.2 million in Lebanon 9 almost a million in Iran 660,000 in Ethiopia and about 650,000 in Jordan none of those countries is a rich country human rights are an issue right now in Australia with a continuing controversy in relation to our treatment of asylum seekers in breach again I say of our obligations under international law and things like the scope of the recent anti-terrorism legislation for instance and the recent changes to immigration legislation which have given unprecedented power without public scrutiny or accountability to the Minister for Immigration I was asked actually the other on ABC radio on Monday what I thought about the radicalization of young people and I I said I I think that the that the approach which is a punitive one big stick one is wrong and it alienates more young people the young people become radical in a situation type of existential despair I think mixed in with adolescent bravado and their sense of lack of consequence their actions and things of that kind with their best the very best thing that I think you can do is actually to provide them with an education hope for the future and somewhere to go after you complete your education I was asked did I think that any of the students at my school were becoming radicalized and I said no I didn't because the school the school exuded hope it's one of those places where if they can if they can get there they know that the school will look after them and we'll move on nobody has asked the opinion of educators in any of this unfortunately the situation for indigenous Australians of course continues to be of huge concern 48 years after that referendum the 2015 closing the gap report showed virtually no progress over the last over the last 12 months except for a very slight reduction in infant mortality rates which continue to be third world levels in in our country and a slight increase in the number of students completing year 12 up to 52% compared to 85% for non- Aboriginal Australians I've heard of course no comment on the quality of that school completion it could be like a study I read from University of Western Sydney a number of years ago before the leading age went out to 17 which showed that low socioeconomic status girls had higher rates of completion of school and boys but that was only because they got nowhere to go there was there was nothing for them to stay at school and then after school about 25% dropped out of the figures they weren't they weren't claiming the doll they weren't in work they weren't an education nothing they were probably having that baby that they hoped they could love and so on current youth unemployment figures I would suggest indicate there are a lot of young people in our community with nowhere to go and that that is a disgrace in an advanced society on the same day of course as the closing the gap report was tabled in the federal parliament the human rights Commission report of the forgotten children was tabled same day ten years after the first report the previous report from the Commission called a last resort and that report a last resort exposed the dreadful effect of prolonged detention on children sadly the findings of the current report aren't all that different from those of a decade ago and despite a significant reduction in the numbers of children in detention in the last part of last year there remain somewhere between a hundred and two or three hundred children depending on who depending on who's counting still living in completely unacceptable conditions in close detention both in Australia and offshore on narrow and Manus Islands both inquiries into children in detention have found the mandatory detention of children to be inconsistent with Australia's international human rights obligations and both have found that prolonged detention causes causes serious mental harm but we had we educated in our school the little boy Cheyenne who who had become completely mute as a result of his treatment or over something like five years in detention he when his parents fled fled Iraq they were that was a normal child when Cheyenne came to us he was he was a very disturbed child indeed and I can't imagine how you can retrieve that degree of damage in the negative completely political climate we now seem to inhabit in Australia message of the of that report was ignored with the government instead intact attacking the integrity of the Commission and its president for publishing what are undoubtedly unpalatable truths of both sides of politics it's however the role of the Human Rights Commission to hold government accountable for human rights not to withhold information that the government doesn't want to have aired the public domain so despite the rhetoric about egalitarianism and the fair go Australia is a country increasingly divided between the have's and have nots rich in the poor the entitled and those without entitlement as I noted earlier we have earlier we have no bill of rights to ensure that basic human rights are respected under law except where they're specifically legislated and that's one of the problems of course with with with the human rights agreements conventions is that they haven't been legislated by and large into local law except for for the things which are in the the wonderful 1975 anti racial discrimination act and in and in interesting the disability standards legislation which came in and the last gasp of the Howard government so we have we have no bill of rights we have no guarantee of human rights in the Constitution and indeed we've recently heard members of the government saying our international human rights treaties may be ignored and that they're irrelevant to to the to the lives of most Australians but when we talk of equity and education we're talking human rights and particularly particularly those rights in article 29a of the convention and I carry this convention with me it's one of the things I keep on my desk at school I try and get my fellow educators to read it it's very interesting reading article 29a the education of the child should be directed to the development of the child's personality talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential we tend to take the right to an education little for granted in Australia where it's been enshrined in law since of the last 150 years but there are many countries where education is not a right and where significant numbers of children go on school especially girls there are currently an estimated 130 million children in the world who don't attend school 70% of girls two-thirds of the world's illiterates are female a society where a large part of the population is illiterate or semi-literate cannot by definition be a progressive society nor can it be a democratic one such as society is also likely to be one with a disregard for other human rights I don't think it's any accident that in such societies schools and teachers and academics and even students become a focus for the violent suppression of rights and we've seen that with the attempt to murder schoolgirl and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafi and that was specifically aimed at silencing her advocacy for the human rights of children especially girls and the kidnapping and enslavement of schoolgirls by Boko Haram in in Nigeria another sort of thing the Taliban in Afghanistan I saw operate on the same premise go back to Pol Potts regime in Cambodia you have a similar thing destroy anyone who wears glasses because they could be educated so education and and human rights are inextricably bound together when you burn the schoolhouse and kill the teacher when you prevent children from going to school you are extinguishing freedom sadly we don't have to look beyond our own country to find violations of the rights of children there's a long history in Australia of these violations most obvious are the violence enacted against the aboriginal people and their deliberate excision from the mainstream of Australian life until comparatively recently the stolen generations the transportation of child convicts the enslavement of Melanesians as indentured labour in Queensland in the 19th century the plight of the child of the British child migrants in the last century the institution neglect and abuse of disabled children and orphans the sexual abuse of children by by people in positions of trust such as priests and teachers and of course the detention of child asylum seekers right now if you're an aboriginal child you are likely to have a life expectancy between 10 and 20 years less than other young Australians you're more likely to be removed from your family than other children one third of all children placed in home out of home care are aboriginal your educational outcomes are likely to be well below those of other Australian children you're more likely to leave school early you're more likely to be unemployed you're more likely to be welfare dependent you're more likely to be addicted you're more likely to live in poverty and you're much more likely to go to jail than other Australians aboriginal Australians are 2.3% of the total population but 27% of the prison population especially and even higher in Northern Territory in Western Australia in recent times we've done somewhat better with disabled children article 23 one of the convention calls upon state signatories to the convention to recognise that a mentally or physically disabled child should enjoy a full and decent life in conditions which ensure dignity promote self-reliance and facilitate the child's active participation in the community this full and decent life includes the right to an education we're physically and intellectually disabled children formally often found themselves locked away an institution sometimes for life and often without education and are generally either in mainstream school settings or special school settings majority are in the public education system we have three we have a support unit my school three classes of children with intellectual disabilities or autism and and they are integrated into the life of the school as completely as we can we can achieve and we also have we had until a few weeks ago five children in wheelchairs and they again are part of life we they play sport along with everybody else albeit with a little difficulty but that's where they should be some of those children would have been locked away in the spastic centres and so on in the past and or in various places and never had the opportunity just to be with other kids who are normal just to be normal kids in a normal school setting I'd have to say although the educational outcomes for disabled children continue generally to be lower than for other children and fewer fewer of them complete their schooling access to education has been critical to the to the development and social integration of these children and to their increased participation in community life I'd argue of course that all children should have a full and decent life that all children should be safe and all children should have the opportunity to live their lives in dignity however we don't extend that that opportunity to every child or even even though many do have that opportunity in recent years the notable exception has been the asylum seeker children held in immigration detention the need the need for two human rights commissions inquiries in ten years is a reflection of the persistence of human rights issues in relation to those children and the refusal of successive federal governments on both sides of politics to acknowledge their legal and moral responsibilities to those children in 2014 and I've I mean to ring this boy when I get back to Sydney one of my asylum seeker students Bashir Yusufi and I made inquiries to the submissions the inquiry in relation both to children in in detention and what happens to them when they come out into community detention on bridging visas remember I've got a lot of those kids in my school but she was one such and he is now put in he's he's now permanent and has put in application for Australian citizenship it's just not happening quickly enough for him his is an extraordinary story he's been alone since he was orphaned at 13 years of age he came to Australia by boat as an accompanied minor like many Afghan children he'd never been to school the figures are something like this only 13% of Afghan girls ever has an opportunity to go to school only about 23% of Afghan boys when my Afghan girls get off that plane here in Sydney they double well wherever they double their life expectancy a minute their feet hit Australian soil the average is the average the average life expectancy for Afghan women's about 42 and and immediately our girls can expect to live into their 80s good on them so Bashir in the Darwin Detention Centre Bashir was given an English dictionary and decided to teach himself to read and write and to learn English words he decided he would learn 15 English words every day and since then he has learned every day of his life he learns 15 new words the dictionary was his classroom as there was no provision for the education of children in the detention centre the lack of educational provision for children in in detention is one of the areas where Australia has consistently been in breach of the convention detention itself of course is a breach of the convention on his release from Darwin he made his way to Sydney and he enrolled at Holroyd High when he was 15 sorry hadn't had any formal schooling just that dictionary he successfully completed his HSC last year and he's doing and he's studying for an accounting diploma this year with a view to enrolling at UWS in accounting next year he's one of the lucky ones because he has a permanent protection visa he got on before the gates all came down there are however another 75 young asylum seekers at Holroyd High either in community detention on bridging visas for whom the future is most uncertain this is not unlike the situation 12 years ago when a significant number of students at the school where asylum seekers on temporary protection visas which have just been brought back the uncertainty of life for these young people has been reinforced in the last fortnight last three weeks by the removal of a year 12 student in community detention from Yeronga High in Brisbane to close detention in Darwin just weeks before the HSC the sensitivity of the timing of this removal is unlikely to be accidental I think it's completely deliberate and it's saying we've got the power we can do what we like you can't you can't set a course in your life which is what people doing the HSC are doing young people are setting the course for their lives they're they're starting to orient themselves towards the future to education to careers to marriage and families and all those things which we value in adult life this this has been interrupted we will take you out we know you've got your HSC so what though for young asylum seekers the one positive aspect of their uncertain lives has been the opportunity to go to school and to make up for time loss from their education and gain a recognized credential like the HSC being removed from school just before the final exams is a potent reminder of how powerless they really are it's unacceptable that there are still children locked up in detention centers where the lessons learned are not those we would want children to learn as the forgotten children report notes the detention of asylum seekers on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea is one of the more shameful aspects of Australian policy civilized societies do not lock children up these children have no access to formal education as you and I know they live in often appalling and squalid conditions with limited access to medical care they are daily witness to acts of violence and in case particularly of unaccompanied minors at risk of physical and sexual abuse where these children in our community any one of these conditions would be reportable I'm a mandatory reporter of child abuse if if a child makes a disclosure me by law I am compelled to report that abuse it's led to an interesting an interesting discussion that we've had at school because we occasionally take children out of Villawood detention center and sort of child there from from there disclosed to a teacher that that he she is being subject to abuse in the center and we make the report we might find ourselves in the same situation as those doctors and social workers and nurses on Madison Nauru who who who get into trouble if they report similar things very interesting to see whether they would be prepared to take a school and teachers to court on mainland Australia but it's an issue it's an issue with a changing with a change legislation my my colleague at when I was school Brian Scott noted in a city morning Harold article last year she said our legal obligation to child protection never contemplated that we would have a government that would not investigate claims of neglect nor choose not to protect or educate those children in its care a number of years ago in 2004 three of our then temporary protection visa asylum seeker students spoke at the launch of of the last resort report and that was named for article 37 B of the convention no child should be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily the arrest detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and she'll be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time video about those kids who've been there for four or five years now one of those three was a girl called Nahid Kareemi who later became known in her fictional manifest manifestation as the protagonist in Libby Gleason's novel math tab story based on Nahid's flight from Afghanistan she spoke about her dangerous journey of flight from Afghanistan the the the getting to Indonesia the experience of the boats travel very very dangerous thing her her experience of immigration detention and the uncertainty of life on on a temporary protection visa and then she spoke about school and it was like a light came on in all of that and that's why one reason why school is so important she she talked about what she learned from coming to school at Holroy which is the only school she'd ever been to although she had been homeschooled Nahid said the three most important things she'd ever she'd learned at school were the importance of the right to freedom of speech the importance of the right to an education and the importance of the right to be yourself and when I when I think about that I think she went right to the heart of what we do in schools they they were the line they were the lines in the sand that she drew between her past and her present and her future indeed and they gave her hope for the future because at that stage she was on a TPV she didn't have Australian citizenship as she does now Nahid developed her understanding of the importance of those rights through her schooling and that was Holroy'd High lights are the ethical and legal basis for the work of schools and teachers we reflect those rights through our iteration of values and through our practice the clear shared iteration of values and uncompromising support for the children who attend Holroy'd High has made the school which described as a beacon of hope for for many refugee and asylum-seeker and disadvantaged and disabled children who attended the school the right to an education the right to be yourself implicit in the right to an education and the right to be yourself is the right to a future our current young asylum seekers are being denied that right at Holroy'd we've put into practice article 29 B of the convention the development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedom so I'll tell you a little bit about about some of our students Afsana who came as a under humanitarian program Kurdish girl now highly successful clinical psychologist in private practice she told me that she never been able to acknowledge that she was Kurdish until she came to our school and I think of Nuria who is one of the most courageous women that I know who spoke out at rallies while she was on the temporary protection of each of the first rally she spoke up was here in Canberra and she stood up this little girl and she said children children should be in school not in jail and we heard that resonated was like that you know the butterfly you the sort of the whole world changes and so we supported her and she spoke to absolutely fearless in taking on people she she now is finishing a degree in accountancy and she's working for us at school as a community liaison officer we've employed her with our gonski money which is spend it while you have it I guess I think of how I and how I was much on my mind at the moment because she came to me a couple of weeks ago how are who who is a Sudanese refugee girl who came through East African refugee camps which are not places you want any child ever to be in she came to us arrived when she was 15 14 or 15 with no English and completely illiterate and she spent a year in our intensive center and then and then came into a bridging course in year 10 and then into years 11 and 12 I was scraped into university with so little formal education and she has just completed just now at the end of the semester she's completed her bachelor of social work and she is thinking of doing law because she actually wants to help people more than social work can do her I I think she is remarkable she told me she told me when she first went to you she said are they all the people in my class so clever I said how are you all a clever person they've all had 12 years of school you've had three and and that's what school then there's sorrow another another African girl sat the HSC last year after only four more four years of formal education and she started a combined bachelor of arts master of teaching degree at the University of Western Sydney this year so Kena I went to her graduation in nursing last year she was the first person in her family to go to school she's the first person in her family to complete school to go to university and to complete university but she won't be the last when children from illiterate backgrounds go on this educational journey they take their entire families with them so Kena is now specializing in midwifery at Concord Hospital and is considering doing medicine she was illiterate until she was 13 there's barrier again I'm thinking of barrier whose family existed on bridging EVs for seven years until they gain permanent residence I argued for his right to complete school after he turned 18 and then his right to go to university asylum seeker students have to pay for international student fees UWS absorbed his fees as as McQuarrie did with Zana Bacabi's fees and University of New South Wales is now doing with another student from our school Barrio is now a successful civil engineer he graduated with honors in engineering his brother Akbar has just graduated in civil engineering their sister Samaya bless her has become an English teacher in a high school in Melbourne and what I what a waste had they not been able to complete their education I think had because that was the implication of of what was happening they did so because the school they attended fought for their right to an education so fundamental to what we do at Horry Highers respect respect and the other side of the coin responsibility that informs everything that happens in the school there our enabling principles through them we build a trust that is essential to our mini civil society the hope for the future that's essential to meaningful engagement with education society and the capacity that enables students to reach their educational potential and we do so in the face of what often seems like intractable government policy I said we were serving a very disadvantaged community majority of our students have been in Australia very short time only in the intensive English Center where kids come for the first year in Australia to learn English through the sort of English they need for education 100% have been in Australia less than a year in the high school 87% of my students are of non English speaking background 38% have been in Australia less than three years 70% less than seven years 60% are a recent refugee background one in six is an asylum seeker and of course none of the students in community detention or in bridging visas has any hope of permanent settlement in this country under government policy their future is uncertain even the near future in the last two years I've had to fight to continue the enrollment of community detention students once they turned 18 that was the subject of a complaint I made to the Human Rights Commission in 2013 finally won that battle it's not a new fight but an old one in 2002 government policy change it's post-tampa and students on temporary protection and bridging visas were made to leave school when they turned 18 in response to this I established a trust fund in the school accounts in 2002 call friends of Zainab after the stateless girl Zainab Kabi who who who was initially helped by the fund and in 2003 a donor trust fund with the National Foundation for Australian women to support refugee and asylum seeker girls at whole rate high complete their education they've continued to do that we've got about 12 students currently at university supported by those funds and friends of Zainab but I thought I might retire but I gave up on that idea it's now sits within the public education foundation and provides scholarships refugee students across New South Wales and this year the ACT and Victoria as well for the last two years of their schooling the first two years of university there we've got over a hundred young refugees and asylum seekers now on those public education foundation scholarships so I think that so really there's another issue which I've just dealt with which is that young people who are permanent residents but haven't been in Australia long enough to get Australian citizenship you have to wait four years now not previous to they are not there they are they're eligible for hex but not for hex help so they have to pay university fees up front so this year we've helped we've helped two of our students because all the students at Holroy caught by this is discriminatory policy a poor education's the way out of their poverty not to go to university it's not feasible and this today this morning being Salomon walked into my office he is one of the two students that we paid their hex fees up front for this year to tell me that he has in a civil engineering at UTS he has passed his first year with his first semester with three distinctions and a credit and the university has given him a scholarship he came to thank me and give me a pen the blessing and and he he when he took my hands he made the traditional Afghan greeting of bending his head to my to my hands and very moving he came to say thank you I don't need your help anymore I'm on my way and that's very exciting so that's a battle I thought I've also made a complaint about that's the Human Rights Commission and Sydney University has taken this up with the Federal Minister of Education but he hasn't replied so what we've done we've built a culture of high expectations sound achievement we've got this year 58% of our students have gone to university and and why is why why is that it's because they they are taking part in programs which enable them to go a smaller number have gone on to TAFE but as I say TAFE has been gutted it's a real problem I think we have to rise to the challenges of these young people for us as teachers it's our job it's also our duty it's an obligation and Australians as Australians I would argue that we all have a vested interest in the successful integration of newly arrived populations into the mainstream of Australian life including refugees and asylum seekers demonizing them for political gain is pointless and it destroys people's lives the consequences for us as a nation both morally and socially are too great should we continue to disregard our obligations under international law despite our largely successful history of migration there should be no room for the politics of racism or exclusion in our society our current policies in relation to asylum seekers diminish us as a nation and diminish us as individual Australians I believe that our treatment of them is one of the the great moral issues of our time although I acknowledge there are many people who would just like them all to go away so we don't we don't want to divide a nation we don't want to see entire communities marginalised that's that's the feeding ground for terrorism and we don't want I don't want young people of any background failing to complete their education unable to achieve their potential and I don't want to live and I'm sure you'd share this with in an unjust society we must never repeat the mistakes of our treatment of the Aboriginal people schools can make a difference to this and that's why I come back to it we we we are actively engaged every day in that civil occupation of educating young people because it's not just the three hours it's actually it's actually the fourth hour it's rights that we're educating young people in and we are providing we do it through our teaching through our support of students through our recognition of their rights and their essential human dignity we make life normal again for children whose lives have been completely disrupted they learn to be optimistic through succeeding in school and the message this sense of their families is a powerful one because it means that they can look to the future that's why rights are important thank you