Summary Report - pdf - Department of Families, Housing ...

Mothers’ educational aspirations fortheir Indigenous childrenFurther to the article on mothers’ expectations for theirchild’s education in the Key Summary Report fromwave 2, this article uses the qualitative data collectedin wave 2 to explore female primary carers’ opinions onwhat constitutes a ’good education’. Previous researchhas (using wave 1 data) shown that the main aspirationprimary carers stated for their child was to receive agood education—in fact close to half mentioned it. Goodeducation included such aspects as finishing Year 12,going to a good school, having good teachers, goingto boarding school, going to university and completinganother type of qualification. Other aspirations expressedby primary carers are illustrated in Figure 34.Good educationThe analysis includes only the responses of women asmost of the primary carers in the study were women(97 per cent). Female primary carers’ views might bedifferent from those of male primary carers. In total, 1,352female primary carers answered the education questionin wave 2. In this article, the term mother is used to refer tofemale primary carers from the Footprints in Time study.wave 2, mothers answered the open-ended question‘What would a good education be for [the study child]?’.Mothers could talk about as many things as they likedin their response, resulting in a number of themes beingcoded to each response. At interview, responses wererecorded in writing by the interviewer and may containtheir paraphrasing.A two-step process was used to analyse mothers’responses to this question. Two researchers analysed thetext responses and identified emergent themes. Based ontheir analysis of the themes, the researchers agreed ona coding frame. A third researcher coded all of the textresponses against the themes in the coding frame. Aniterative process was used during analysis so that codeswere refined as necessary and new codes were addedas themes emerged during the analysis.The themes were grouped into four main categoriesshown in Figure 35: (1) the level of education the childachieves (depicted in dark orange), (2) school andteacher qualities (depicted in light orange), (3) learningoutcomes (depicted in grey), and (4) the child’s future(depicted in black).Building on the finding that most mothers aspire for theirchildren to have a good education, this report examineswhat mothers believed a good education to be. InFigure 34: Mothers’ aspirations for their children, per cent82 Footprints in Time: The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children | Key Summary Report from Wave 3