Education Reform as Organized Abandonment? A Spatial Analysis of School Consolidation in Remote Aboriginal Communities of the Northern Territory of Australia, 2014–2018

Abstract

Over the past four decades, neoliberal reforms have reshaped education systems globally. Among these, school consolidation remains a popular policy instrument promising efficiency, consistency, and scale. In some urban contexts, however, consolidation has produced uneven impacts along racial and socioeconomic lines. This study shifts attention from the global metropole to small, diverse Indigenous communities using the case of a high-school consolidation process continuing to affect Aboriginal communities across the sparsely populated Northern Territory of Australia. Situating the reform within literature on organized abandonment, we use a Huff gravity model and a series of spatial regression models to examine which communities were targeted and affected by a school consolidation policy under the Northern Territory government’s Indigenous Education Strategy (2015–2024). Results suggest that consolidation might have disproportionately affected communities further from remote service hubs, particularly those where traditional languages remain dominant. We argue that the Indigenous Education Strategy represents a modality of organized abandonment that responsibilizes individuals not simply through restructuring formal access to education, but through altering the terms on which that access is offered. For scholars of uneven educational distribution, these findings underscore the need to examine how race, geography, and fiscal logics continue to interact in school restructuring. In Australia, they show how school consolidation can work to undermine Aboriginal communities’ aspirations for educational and political autonomy.