For Indigenous teenagers like those currently enrolled in the Ngurang-gu Yalbilinya program - which takes on boys who have become disengaged with education -, it's one of the many ways the pandemic is disproportionately affecting Indigenous people - who are among the community's most vulnerable.

It's particularly frustrating for the program's facilitators when the innovative education model was only recently celebrating huge success for the dramatic spike it had had seen in attendance as well as huge improvement to literacy and numeracy.

Now for many of them, those same barriers the boys were in the middle of overcoming were "absolutely huge" again, according to Ngurang-gu Yalbilinya teacher Tim Bennett.

Along with the Orange Local Aboriginal Lands Council and Orange Aboriginal Medical Service, teachers from Ngurang-gu Yalbilinya have been checking in with the students and their families throughout the lockdown, but Mr Bennett said it was challenging trying to provide that same level of support to students when they couldn't stay in touch with them throughout the day.

"It's difficult because a lot of them haven't got access to computers, they haven't got spaces for them to work - and this is where we could really fall behind... because the kids haven't got access to all these things like Zoom and [Microsoft] Teams," Mr Bennett said.

"It's absolutely huge. This is what people don't understand about why these kids are behind [at school].

"We send out a work package every week and then check on them three times a week and then pick it up on Friday.

"We're monitoring their work every week so they're still doing their spelling tests and the reading but it's a lot of pressure on parents to support this as well."

Last year's Closing the Gap Report said Australia had not met goals on school attendance, nor in the share of Indigenous children at or above national minimum standards in reading and numeracy by 2018.

While a 2019 National Report on Schooling in Australia showed that the average attendance rate for Indigenous students was 81.5 percent, compared to 92 percent for non-Indigenous students.

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