School of the Air
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School of the Air is a generic term for correspondence schools catering for the primary and early secondary education of children in remote and outback Australia.
The school celebrated its 50th birthday on the 8th of June in 2000.
School classes were conducted via shortwave radio from 1951 through 2002, after which most schools switched to wireless internet technologies to deliver lessons that include live one-way video feeds and clear two-way audio. Each student has direct contact with a teacher in a major inland town such as Broken Hill, Alice Springs or Meekatharra. Each student typically spends one hour per day receiving group or individual lessons from the teacher, and the rest of the day working through the assigned materials with a parent, older sibling or a hired home-stay tutor.
Traditionally the students received their course materials and returned their written work and projects to their hub centre using either the Royal Flying Doctor Service or infrequent and unreliable post office services. However the extension of Internet services into the outback now enables more rapid review of each child's homework.
The Alice Springs School of the Air currently has 120 primary school students spread over an area of 1,300,000 square kilometres. Aboriginal children represent approximately 15 percent of the enrollment.
As the children are in isolated situations, the School of the Air is frequently their first attempt at socialisation with children outside their immediate family. This is supplemented by annual gatherings where the children travel to the school to spend one week with their teacher and classmates.
Tourists can visit their facility in Alice Springs. Most of the live broadcasting takes place in the morning, and there are weekly assemblies on Friday, attended, on occasion, by students from the Outback who happen to be in Alice Springs.
