This article shares the narratives of young rural and regional classical musicians in Australia as they navigated their musical journeys. Challenges are explored, including the lack of resources, and the need to travel long distances and the associated costs. Study participants reflected on their feelings of isolation and lack of understanding…

Geographically unequal distribution of opportunities for participation in post-school education particularly affects young people in rural and regional areas of Australia. This study contends that the perception of opportunities by young people from low socio-economic status backgrounds should be considered alongside the distribution of…

Education provides opportunities for adolescents to make developmental gains. Remote Indigenous adolescents not engaged in education programs need alternate learning opportunities to reach developmental goals. This review identifies attributes that contribute to an alternate model of education within the existing literature and reports on the…

Bilingual and Indigenous language and culture programmes have run in remote Australian schools with significant and continuing local support. Developments such as the new national Indigenous languages curriculum offer a further opportunity to broaden and sustain Indigenous language teaching and learning activities in these schools. However, over…

This paper explores migrant women's encounters with formal and informal education in what can be termed new immigration rural destinations. We ask to what extent educational opportunities are realized in these new destinations. We show that education aspirations may be jeopardized because of the desire to achieve economic goals and thus require…

Young people in low socioeconomic (SES) regions, including regional and rural areas of Australia, aspire to attend university after high school at a comparable rate to young people in higher SES regions. However, without concrete opportunities to support and develop their aspirations, students in regional areas are unable to internalize the goals…

This study compares rural educational disadvantage across Australia, Canada, and New Zealand using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Across the three countries, student reading literacy and school learning environments are less positive in rural communities…

School completion has been hailed by many as the 'holy grail' of Indigenous education, and 42% remote-living Indigenous students now attain year 12 completion each year. But for a range of complex reasons, only 60% of these graduates translate this achievement into further engagement in study, training or employment. This systematic literature…

This study explored the experience of having a child educated away from home at boarding school for Aboriginal parents living in regional and remote communities in Western Australia (WA). In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 participants and thematic analysis found the following major themes emerged from the data: (1) Access, Standards and…

This paper draws from a large longitudinal study into issues related to student retention beyond the compulsory years of schooling and gives voice to a commonly-overlooked set of stakeholders, namely those in the community. Although many studies report on students' and teachers' opinions of the influence of the community on student engagement and…

The lower rates of participation in higher education of people from remote areas, together with the under-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in higher education, make it less likely that students from remote Indigenous communities will aspire to attend university. Educators and community must develop working…

This article reports on a qualitative evaluation of the Science in Schools program; a suite of science based activities delivered by staff of a regional university campus and designed to provide professional development for science teachers working in non-metropolitan schools in a socioeconomically disadvantaged region of Australia. The research…

This paper documents the voices of Australian rural students as a means of examining students' views of the obstacles confronting them in their endeavours to fulfil the aspirations and expectations for their future imagined lives. The paper draws upon a national research project, and more specifically, data collected in a series of focus group…

Schools have always been central to rural communities, but today they are critical to the sustainability of social and economic life for people who live beyond major centres of population. The development of virtual structures and processes that enhance classes in and between rural schools has provided extended educational and, indirectly,…

This paper explores the relationships between population density, social interaction patterns, and morale in rural communities. It tests two apparently competing hypotheses concerning rural population density, social interaction patterns and overall levels of morale: one, that low (and rapidly declining) rural densities lead to feelings of…