CA SE STUDY National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition Transforming Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education I like my education like I like my coffee – strong and Blak.” Hayley McQuire, Co-founder and CEO of the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition The National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition (NIYEC) is working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to call for an Indigenous-led education system, and to demand truth-telling by the mainstream education system. “We recognise the transformative effects education can have in our lives and communities,” says Hayley McQuire, a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman, and the co-founder and CEO of NIYEC. “Through education we can assert self-determination, improve health outcomes, support employment opportunities and build our communities.” Australia has the fourth most socially segregated education system in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which measures the extent to which schools are segregated by socio-economic status. In Australia 51 per cent of disadvantaged students are concentrated in disadvantaged schools and that inequity is growing. The only countries with more socially segregated schools are Mexico, Hungary and Chile.10 51% of disadvantaged students are concentrated in disadvantaged schools. “This inequality disproportionately impacts our mob, given that inequitable education in Australia has been used as a tool of colonisation, to assimilate and control our people, to take from us our cultures and languages, and to erase us from the history books,” Hayley says. PHOTO: Hayley McQuire, NIYEC Co-founder and National Coordinator at the Education of Our Own Design Workshop in Melbourne, 2019 (Mimi Fields) 24 Transforming Power: Voices for Generational Change