Powers of Persuasion: Advertising: Indigenous Scholarships

The Aurora Education Foundation is an Indigenous organisation that supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to realise their full education and employment potential – whether it is completing Year 12 or achieving a PhD from Oxford.

AIEF provides scholarships that enable Indigenous students in financial need to attend leading Australian schools and universities.

Apart from obvious reasons like inspiration, setting an example, or showing what is possible, there's a more opaque reason we need Aboriginal role models: the media.

Source: Famous Aboriginal people, activists & role models - Creative Spirits, retrieved from https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/famous-aboriginal-people-role-models

Closing the Gap acknowledges the ongoing strength and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in sustaining the world’s oldest living cultures.
Closing the Gap is underpinned by the belief that when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a genuine say in the design and delivery of policies, programs and services that affect them, better life outcomes are achieved. It also recognises that structural change in the way governments work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is needed to close the gap.

School completion rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are well below the rates for
non-Indigenous students. The target of halving the gap by 2020 in Year 12 (or equivalent) attainment rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students is a major national challenge

Indigenous education disadvantage remains among the most pressing and persistent public policy challenges in Australia. Despite bipartisan and intergovernmental commitment to ‘Closing the Gap’, has done little to move the needle in education outcomes.

Government policies on Indigenous education are underpinned by the idea of a child being ready for school. But for students to succeed we need to ask how ready is our education system to support Indigenous students?