The recent National Review of Education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (in 1995) called for research and analysis of the immediate and long-term complexities of building community-controlled education for Indigenous Australians.

In spite of over 20 years of Government promotion of self-determination in education as a pathway to better educational outcomes for Indigenous Australians:

Employment strategies aimed at raising the economic status of Indigenous people are also implicitly committed to raising occupational status. This is because of the link between poor economic outcomes for Indigenous people and their over-concentration in unskilled jobs.

One characteristic of the Indigenous population which makes it difficult to plan for the delivery of services such as health, housing, employment and education, is the fact that Indigenous people move a great deal. Frequent changes in location cause variation in the level of demand for services at different times in different places. To add to the difficulty, little is known about the details of this population movement as the census is not designed to measure it. Consequently, while the existence of short-term mobility is well-known from community-based case studies, few data exist.