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The last leg of Steve Fennell's trip home from school is his family's 64-kilometre long drive-way.
The 13-year-old has just finished his first year at boarding school, 900 kilometres away from his family's cattle property in South Australia's far north.
The change from living on a remote cattle property to a boarding school in Port Pirie has been huge.
"There's lots of new people," he says.
"I've never played sport until this year."
Steve is the family's second child. Their eldest graduated from the same high school last year and the youngest will start boarding in four years.
But it's not just the travel that's difficult — the financial cost has increased substantially since the Fennells started sending children to boarding school.
Boarding school costs rising
Data collected by the Isolated Children's Parents' Association (ICPA) shows that the cost of boarding has been going up for years.
In South Australia, the cost of a full year of boarding reached an average of $23,304 in 2022, a 16 per cent jump from 2015.
But that is the smallest percentage increase compared to other parts of Australia.
Queensland has grown 22 per cent in the same time, while the cost in the Northern Territory went up 74 per cent from 2015 to 2021.
Those figures are just for the boarding element, providing food and accommodation.
Tuition fees and extracurricular activities like sport or music are additional costs.
Steve's mother Gillian Fennell says her family is one of the lucky ones as they can find the money, but associated costs like travel make it even harder to keep up with rising boarding fees.
"It's a massive financial pressure," she says.
Subsidies offer little hope
The federal government offers a subsidy called the Assistance for Isolated Children (AIC) Scheme, which is accessed by about 4,000 students.
For 2024, the rate is set at $9,960 for every student who lives more than 56 kilometres away from their nearest government school.
Another $2,856 is available for students whose parents earn below $62,634.
The scheme increases each year at the rate of the Consumer Price Index but this is being outpaced by rising boarding costs.
When Assistance for Isolated Children was first introduced in 1973, it covered 55 per cent of average boarding costs.
In 2015 that slipped between 39 and 55 per cent, depending on the state, but now it covers between 33 and 44 per cent of average boarding fees.
To address this, the federal government has introduced 100 new scholarships which will begin this year, worth up to $20,000 for every year of a child's schooling.
Thirty of the scholarships are for First Nations students, leaving 70 for the rest of remote Australia.
Steve submitted an application, but with just 100 scholarships on offer, the odds were slim.
His application was rejected.
"I don't necessarily think it's quite fair ... there's heaps of bush kids that might want and need it a lot more than me and other people that might have gotten it," he says.
Ms Fennell says there are many families living in remote and isolated areas across Australia who don't have access to secondary education.
"We live in Australia and everyone here is entitled to a decent education regardless of where they live," she says.
"We don't expect a free ride ... but we would just like a little bit of support to get our kids to secondary school in the first place."
Scholarships make a difference
In Queensland alone, there are 12 local government areas without any high school, and another seven that have schools that only go up to year 10.
Isolated Children's Parents' Association president Louise Martin says the concept of the scholarship, which is in its pilot phase, is "fantastic".
"The 70 kids getting the scholarships wouldn't have been able to go to boarding school with just the AIC," she says.
Ms Martin says education is a key reason why essential workers like policemen, nurses, teachers and "the council CEO" leave a remote community, even if they were otherwise happy living there.
"They will come and stay in the community, love the community, want to stay forever, but as soon as their first child hits high school they will pack up and leave," she says.
"If you're a salary earner in a town in rural and remote Australia you're not going to be able to afford boarding school."
In a statement, Assistant Minister for Education and Regional Development Anthony Chisholm said the new scholarship was only in its first year and there had been significant demand for the $10.9 million program.
There were 353 applications for the 100 places, he said, with the scholarships going to people from low and low-middle income families.
"We will now evaluate the program's outcomes and consider additional places in future years," he said.
"We can't allow Australia to become a country where your chances in life depend on where you live. If you're a child today from the bush, or if you're Indigenous, you're three times more likely to fall behind at school.
"The Albanese government is committed to working with state and territory governments to change this by putting all schools on a path to full and fair funding."
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