While important, financial and geographic disparities alone do not explain the gap in education attendance and attainment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. For most Indigenous youth who wish to attend high school or a tertiary institution there is usually one available relatively close by that is free or, in the case of universities, able to be paid through the tax system later in life. Rather, it would appear that the benefits of doing so do not outweigh the costs. While much is known about the disparities in education between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, there is relatively little known about what, in a behavioural sense, is driving these disparities.

The aim of this paper is to identify some of the parameters that would constitute a behavioural model of Indigenous education. We pose a number of research questions that we attempt to answer using data from the 2006 cohort of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) and the 2008 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS). Although the focus of this paper is primarily on the development of a model of education for the Indigenous population, a number of policy conclusions and recommendations for future data collection are also given.

Nicholas Biddle is a Fellow and Timothy Cameron a Research Assistant at CAEPR, ANU.