Beyond the outskirts of Alice Springs, a great expanse awaits.
The state capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, the Outback city is perhaps best known for being close to the sacred red rock of Uluru – with the concept of proximity applied liberally here.
It’s surrounded by the vast central Australian desert – red sand dotted by spinifex grass, thorny acacias and bushland as far as the eye can see.
Few people inhabit this unpredictable part of the Earth. Home to many of Australia’s indigenous peoples for tens of thousands of years, most of the white people who have settled down here are cattle farmers.
Living an isolated Outback life poses a number of challenges, particularly for those intent on raising a family here.
Decades before schools around the world switched to remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic, Australia’s Outback children were already taught using a similar – yet initially more basic – approach.
In 1951, the first School of the Air opened in Alice Springs, to provide schooling to children living in isolated areas.
“This is truly an exceptional school that is changing lives and creating better futures for the children of the Outback,” visitors are told at the School of the Air visitor centre.
If it wasn’t for the School of the Air, children might be forced to leave home at a very young age to attend boarding school, says Kerrie Russell, director at the school for seven years.
Currently some 100 pupils from age 4 to 15 are taught remotely by 14 teachers. While they are separated from their classmates by hundreds of kilometres most of time, they are part of the “world’s largest classroom” stretching across 1.3 million square kilometres in the southern Northern Territory.
The Alice Springs location was the first of 16 Schools of the Air that have since been established across Australia – including in the mining town of Broken Hill in the state of New South Wales to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.
From pedal radio to Starlink
The idea for the School of the Air came from Adelaide Miethke, a member of the Flying Doctor Service of South Australia.
The Flying Doctors are another ingenious scheme that has been providing health care to the population living in remote areas since 1928.
A former teacher, Miethke travelled to Alice Springs in 1944. During her visit to a remote cattle station, as farms are called in this part of the world, she recognized the difficulties facing parents trying to school their children in the Outback.
She proposed to teach lessons via radio using a new invention by Alfred Traeger who had devised an easy-to-use radio transmitter-receiver powered by a pedal-driven generator.
The Flying Doctors were already using this contraption, called the pedal radio, for their communications. Miethke suggested that it could also be employed to teach children remotely.
The School of Air in Alice Springs started off in the Flying Doctors base and only moved to its current location in the city in 1978.
“At the beginning, they were talking into a big silence, without any interaction with the students,” says Paddy McFarland who works at the centre.
But teachers soon recognized the need for their pupils to interact with them and a question-and-answer segment was introduced.
When Princess Diana and Prince Charles visited the School of Air in 1983 and answered question from Outback children via radio, communication was still accompanied by extremely loud static.
It was only when the school began to use the internet from 2000, becoming completely reliant on satellite technology in 2006, that video calls became possible and pupils and teachers were finally able to work face-to-face.
Most recently, the school has started using Starlink, the satellite network operated by company SpaceX owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk to provide even the remotest areas with internet connectivity.
Growing up in the Outback
Australia is the sixth largest country in the world but one of the most sparsely populated. Many rural areas are dotted with giant cattle farms. The largest one in the world, Anna Creek in southern Australia, stretches across some staggering 23,000 square kilometres – roughly the size of Israel.
An average Outback cattle station spans some 3,000 square kilometres, and most of the School of the Air pupils grow up on one of them.
Others live in remote indigenous communities or isolated mining towns.
Dust, flies, droughts and floods are part of everyday life in this inhospitable part of the world.
“Children are usually quite happy in these isolated areas,” says school director Kerrie Russell. “On the cattle stations there is always a lot going on and even at a young age they can help out and make themselves useful.”
School materials are sent to the pupils’ homes and all of them are supplied with a free computer. At the School of the Air, which is funded by the states, classes range from eight to 20 pupils per class.
Teachers are based in a studio equipped with several cameras that provide different angles on the lessons presented, while an online platform is used to provide feedback on the children’s work.
Home tutors
Lessons at the School of the Air take up a maximum of two hours per day. Apart from that, students are required to study individually for three to four hours while being supervised by a home tutor.
This may be a parent or a legal guardian, or someone specifically employed for that task.
Once a year, teachers visit each pupil in person, while the entire class and parents come together four times a year at the School of the Air in Alice Springs.
During one week of in-person learning and excursions, there’s ample opportunity to make new friends.
“These direct interactions are really important,” says Russell.
Some families have to drive through the red dirt for hours to reach Alice Springs.
