September 19, 2014

Indigenous high school students graduate from mentoring program

Students mentor Indigenous kids to help boost educational completion rates.

More than 120 Illawarra Indigenous high school students graduated from the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) program at UOW last week (10 September).

AIME was established at UOW in 2008 to redress imbalance in high school completion rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, by recruiting university students to give Indigenous students support, guidance and encouragement to complete high school and go on to some form of tertiary education.

Wollongong Centre Manager Brenden Newton believes AIME is an important program for the Illawarra and South Coast, to inspire Indigenous students to reach their full potential.

“Figures paint a fairly negative picture around school completion and local Indigenous students. AIME is important because such students are wonderfully talented and intelligent, therefore AIME offers the belief and support to image what’s possible,” he said.

 UOW’s AIME program is run at 18 schools in the Illawarra – tripling the number of schools originally involved – and 15 schools in the Shoalhaven and South Coast areas.

Currently, there are more than 200 UOW students mentoring with AIME.  

“We spoke to about 10,000 UOW students in March, received 1500 expressions of interest, resulting in 216 mentors signed, trained and mentoring at AIME,” Brenden said.

Next year, AIME at UOW hopes to reach even more local Indigenous students by increasing mentee numbers at existing AIME schools, and inviting new schools to be a part of the program.

The graduation was held at the Centre for Student Engagement, which kindly donated their rooms for the graduation.