A brief review of literature on boarding school education for indigenous students and recent Australian media coverage of the issue Tessa Benveniste, Samantha Disbray and John Guenther September 2014 Rationale and overview Despite the importance and currently topical nature of the delivery of education to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students through boarding schools, the research base and literature is relatively small. The Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation’s (CRC-REP) Remote Education Systems (RES) project is seeking to address this lack of research attention, and this summary is a starting point for scoping a research program to investigate the costs, benefits and experience of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their communities in accessing education through boarding schools in Australia. This summary reviews existing literature, with the goal of identifying driving forces and motivations of governments, education and scholarship providers and students and families for this education option. To do so, we draw on Canadian and US academic literature, as well as Australian literature. For this working paper, the review is not exhaustive and should not be seen as the summary of all literature on the topic. It is simply designed to provide some context for a broader understanding of the contemporary issues related to boarding for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australia. The scope of the literature excludes a specific focus on examples of contemporary boarding school practice. We also look to public discourse, in particular reporting in the Australian media to examine this issue. To this end, this review provides an analysis of a small-scale survey of recent media reporting on the topic. The sample comprises 31 media reports from 5 sources: The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Koori Mail newspapers, plus the ABC (radio and television as available on line). Most reports are from 2012-2014; the earliest is from 2004. The method used to access reports was by searching the media provider directly, via on-line searches. The sample is not exhaustive, but a number of key motivations emerge and, in part interlink with those in the academic literature. Literature: Historical background to indigenous boarding schools We begin with an examination of the Australian and international literature as it relates to indigenous peoples. We consider this from the perspective of policies and philosophies that underpinned the development of boarding (or residential) schools. History is important. As Mander (2012, p. 16), in his study of Western Australia boarding school experiences notes, “Experiences such as colonisation, massacres, genocide, the forcible removal of children from families, social and cultural marginalisation, and racism have all made a contribution to the construction of the contemporary context of Indigenous Education”. Attempts to divorce the present and future from the past inevitably deny the realities of those who experienced or face the consequences of those histories. Assimilation It is widely recognised amongst indigenous and non-indigenous peoples that the historical purpose of boarding schools was to assimilate their peoples into the dominant society of 1