In a remote East Kimberley community, well over 3,000 kilometres from Perth by road, a ten-year-old logs into a video lesson each morning through the WA School of Isolated and Distance Education, her teacher speaking from a screen in a city she has never visited. At high school her family faces a harder choice: keep her home, taught largely by distance and whichever staff a small local school can currently hold, or send her away — hundreds of kilometres to a boarding hostel in Broome, Karratha or Perth — for a fully staffed timetable. Neither option is free or easy. It is a choice thousands of families across the Kimberley, the Pilbara, the Goldfields and the Gascoyne make every year, and it sits at the centre of what WA's regional and remote school system delivers once distance from Perth is accounted for.
The Department of Education's own remoteness classification — Metropolitan, Provincial, Remote and Very Remote — sets staffing formulas, allowances and which subjects a student can study on-site rather than by video link. That classification is the fault line along which the state's education outcomes split most sharply, and it is the subject of this audit: what the Cook government has done to staff and connect its furthest schools, what the evidence shows about whether it is working, and what is still owed to students for whom "regional" means a plane ride, not a bus ride, from the nearest specialist teacher.
What the Cook government did
The Cook government did not create WA's regional teacher shortage. A Ministerial Taskforce reporting to WA Parliament traced it to a progressive, multi-year decline in teachers available for hard-to-staff schools, driven partly by falling enrolments in teaching degrees — a problem well over a decade old and not unique to WA (approx.; WA Parliament, Education Workforce Initiatives Report). Building on measures from the preceding McGowan government, Cook Labor has expanded a package of cash incentives. Its centrepiece, the Country Teaching Program, pays teachers and school leaders between $5,000 and $13,730 a year depending on isolation, with permanency after two years of continuous, satisfactory service (WA Department of Education, Incentives and Allowances, 2025). Alongside it sits a Remote Teaching Allowance of up to $20,870 a year for the most isolated postings (WA Dept of Education, Incentives and Allowances, 2025, approx.), and, since September 2023, a temporary Regional Attraction and Retention Incentive of up to $8,500, paid mostly to staff who see the school year through (WA Government media statement, 20 September 2023). The government extended that scheme in November 2024 with a further $8.4 million, after it grew well beyond its initial 48 eligible schools (WA Government media statement, 3 November 2024). A teacher who takes a country post keeps a guaranteed right to return to a permanent metropolitan position for up to three years.
Money has followed the announcements. The 2024-25 State Budget allocated $6.8 billion to school education, up $224 million, or 3.6 per cent, on the previous year (WA Government, 2024-25 Budget, Investing in Education and Training, May 2024). Within that, $6.5 million from Royalties for Regions extended the Kimberley Schools Project, helping principals and teachers adapt delivery to Kimberley communities, and $4.7 million was committed to the 128 WA public schools with fewer than 100 students (WA Government, 2024-25 Budget, Investing in Our Regions, May 2024). Distance education and boarding support continue to operate as they have since the state's standalone hostel authority was wound up in 2017.
The strongest case
A continent-sized state cannot be staffed like a city
WA's problem differs in scale from anywhere bar the Northern Territory. Some public schools sit thousands of kilometres from the nearest teacher-training campus, connected to Perth by a single sealed road that, in the wet season, is sometimes impassable. National teacher-supply pressure — falling education-degree enrolments, an ageing workforce, every state competing for the same shrinking graduate pool — lands hardest on a remote WA school, because it is the last posting a graduate with options chooses and the first a struggling teacher leaves. None of that was created by the Cook government; the decline stretches back well over a decade and mirrors trends across Australia.
Judged against that starting point, the response is reasonable. Incentives that scale with isolation, a guaranteed return path and permanency after two years are a sensible way to compete for a scarce workforce without conscripting anyone. The Kimberley Schools Project and small-schools top-up correctly recognise that a city-built funding formula punishes a community for being remote. None of it guarantees outcomes alone — but it is the right shape of response, and any government facing the same map would need broadly the same tools.
Staffing the bush
The Auditor General's 2023 review of how the Department supports its schools found regional education directors — whose role includes brokering extra help for struggling schools and principals — have limited capacity to do so, a constraint that bites hardest where distance already makes support harder to deliver (Office of the Auditor General WA, Report 22: 2022-23, Effectiveness of Public School Reviews, 24 May 2023). The incentive scheme's own growth is a second measure of how widespread the problem remains: introduced for a defined list of hardest-to-staff schools in September 2023, it had grown enough by late 2024 that government committed a further $8.4 million to sustain it, up from an initial 48 schools (WA Government media statement, 3 November 2024).
Getting to school: boarding and distance education
For decades, the state's answer to remote secondary schooling ran partly through the Country High School Hostels Authority, a statutory body running residential colleges for students whose nearest high school was too far to reach daily. In its final full year of independent operation, the Authority's nine residential colleges housed 593 secondary students from 21 schools — 16 government, four Catholic, one independent (Country High School Hostels Authority, Annual Report 2016-17). The School Boarding Facilities Legislation Amendment and Repeal Act 2016 folded its functions into the Department of Education from 1 July 2017, alongside the means-tested Boarding Away from Home Allowance that still helps eligible families cover the cost of sending a teenager away to board.
Families who keep children home fall back on the School of Isolated and Distance Education, known as SIDE, based in Perth's Leederville and delivering lessons by video link and correspondence to students meeting eligibility criteria including geographical isolation. SIDE also runs a Primary Languages Program, teaching five languages into regional and remote primary classrooms that could not otherwise offer one (WA Dept of Education/SIDE, program information, 2025). Both arrangements are, by design, second-best: a screen is not a classroom, and a hostel bed hundreds of kilometres from home is not the same as living with family while finishing school. They exist because the alternative — no secondary schooling within reach — is worse.
The achievement gap
The clearest evidence that distance still translates into disadvantage sits in the national data collected annually by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. In 2024, only 35.2 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students nationally attended school 90 per cent of the time or more, a gap of 26.4 percentage points below non-Indigenous students — and South Australia, WA and the Northern Territory all recorded gaps wider than that national figure (ACARA, National Report on Schooling in Australia 2024, Chapter 4.2). The gap widens with remoteness: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students' semester attendance rate was 79.9 per cent in major cities, 66.6 per cent in remote areas and 54.9 per cent in very remote areas — a classification covering much of WA's Kimberley and Goldfields (ACARA, National Report on Schooling in Australia 2024, Chapter 4.2). Among Year 10 students in very remote Australia, only 39.2 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students attended regularly, against 79.0 per cent of non-Indigenous students in the same communities (ACARA, National Report on Schooling in Australia 2024, Chapter 4.2).
WA's own figures track the same story. Department of Education data for Semester 1, 2023 put overall public school attendance at 86.4 per cent, against 68.4 per cent for Aboriginal students (WA Dept of Education, Semester 1 2023 attendance data, approx.). WA did record the largest single-year improvement of any jurisdiction in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander attendance between 2022 and 2023, roughly 3.7 percentage points (approx.; national comparative attendance dataset) — real progress, from a low base, the government can fairly claim.
The state's own auditor found no improvement in attendance across five years of trying. National data since shows the gap widens, not narrows, with every extra kilometre from Perth.
The critique
Start with how the incentive scheme is built. The Regional Attraction and Retention Incentive is explicitly described, in the government's own language, as a temporary initiative — its continuation depends on each year's budget round, not a standing feature (WA Government media statements, 20 September 2023 and 3 November 2024). That sits awkwardly against a workforce problem the government's own Taskforce calls structural and multi-year (approx.; WA Parliament, Education Workforce Initiatives Report). A community that has watched teachers cycle through one temporary scheme after another has little reason to expect this one to be different.
The dollars are also modest against the budget they sit inside. The Kimberley Schools Project extension, small-schools top-up and 2024 incentive expansion together add up to roughly $19.6 million (approx.) against a $6.8 billion schools budget — around 0.3 per cent of the total (WA Government, 2024-25 Budget, May 2024; WA Government media statement, 3 November 2024). Remote and very remote schools carry structurally higher costs per student — smaller classes, freight, housing and relief-staff travel all cost more, a reality the Productivity Commission's annual Report on Government Services is designed to make comparable across jurisdictions (Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2025, Part B, Section 4: School Education, 11 February 2025). Meanwhile the 2023 Auditor General finding that regional education directors have limited capacity to broker support for struggling schools points to a system where money is arriving at the school gate faster than the people meant to coordinate its use (Office of the Auditor General WA, Report 22: 2022-23, 24 May 2023).
The two-year, return-to-the-city design of the incentive scheme is itself part of the problem. It is humane to the teacher and defensible as recruitment policy, but it works against the long-term relationship a young Aboriginal student in a very remote community needs from the adult teaching them to read. A Year 3 class that gets a new, first-posting teacher every year or two is not equivalent to one with a stable, experienced teacher who knows the community — and the compounding gaps documented above are consistent with a system that has, for years, staffed its hardest schools with its newest, most transient teachers. Distance education and boarding are framed by the department as accommodations for isolation, not substitutes for a fully staffed local school — but for many WA families they are the only realistic option, meaning the state has effectively accepted a two-tier system rather than closed it.
Finally, there is a transparency gap. The most recent Auditor General deep-dive specifically on WA public school attendance dates to 2015, when the office found no measurable improvement across five years and flagged a high unexplained absence rate among Aboriginal students (Office of the Auditor General WA, Report 16: 2015, 19 August 2015). A decade on, national data shows the same pattern persisting and widening with remoteness, yet there has been no equivalent, dedicated WA performance audit since to test whether a decade of incentive schemes and the Kimberley Schools Project has actually closed the gap it targets, or simply managed its edges.
The risk to the future
A widening gap outlives any one incentive round
An attendance and achievement gap that compounds from primary school does not stay in the classroom. It feeds directly into outcomes tracked under the national Closing the Gap agreement — employment, health and justice measures that begin with whether a child could read and do arithmetic at the expected level. Nationally, only four of nineteen socioeconomic Closing the Gap targets were assessed as on track in the Productivity Commission's most recent compilation, and the target covering student learning is not among them (Productivity Commission, Closing the Gap Annual Data Compilation Report, July 2025). Every year the gap in WA's furthest communities does not close is debt carried into adult outcomes the state will eventually fund at far greater cost than a teacher's incentive payment.
A second, more immediate risk sits underneath the first. Much of the current regional funding, including the Kimberley Schools Project, draws on Royalties for Regions — a revenue stream tied to iron ore and other mineral royalties that rises and falls with commodity prices the state does not control. A policy built partly on a cyclical revenue source is exposed to being trimmed exactly when a mining downturn also puts pressure on remote family incomes and, in turn, school attendance. Locking the incentive scheme and the small-schools and Kimberley funding into a permanent, budget-resilient base, rather than a line re-announced each year, is the clearest test of whether this government intends to close the gap it has documented, or manage it one budget cycle at a time.