Private-school scholarships can transform individual lives, but selective admissions make success rates a poor measure of what schools achieve – and leave the hardest-to-help children largely invisible.

The Coalition’s spokesperson for Indigenous Australians, Julian Leeser, wants more disadvantaged Aboriginal students to attend private schools. His case rests on retention. Indigenous students in private schools remain enrolled through to Year 12 at a rate of 91.4 per cent, compared with 59 per cent across all school types. “What is it,” he asks, “that the non-government schools are doing that is so successful?”

It is a fair question, but aimed in the wrong direction. Retention is a cohort measure, not a record of individual students. It counts enrolments at the beginning and end, not whether they are the same students, and can technically exceed 100 per cent.

As education researcher Jessa Rogers points out, Year 12 attainment – the measure of completed schooling – still shows young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults trailing their non-Indigenous peers by more than 20 percentage points. We have no breakdown between private and public schools.

Leeser’s statistic tells us who remained enrolled. It tells us nothing about who was admitted, rejected, returned home or never encouraged to apply. That is the question philanthropy in Australian education too often avoids: who gets chosen to be helped, and what happens to everyone else?

Scholarships and boarding places are not handed out at random among disadvantaged children. Someone decides. The Australian Indigenous Education Foundation (AIEF), which helps fund Indigenous boarding places at leading private schools, requires applicants to be enthusiastic, likely to........

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