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‘Practical’ reconciliation is a government policy that attempts to address the immediate needs of Indigenous people in areas such as employment, health, housing and education. As a way to measure the success of such a policy, this paper analyses recent trends in the engagement of Indigenous people with the Australian education system between 1986 and 2001. The authors present a cohort analysis of changes in educational participation and an analysis of the differences between the level and type of educational qualifications of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians over the last four censuses. The key finding is that while there have been some absolute improvements in Indigenous educational outcomes over the period 1986 to 2001, these gains are not as significant when measured relative to non-Indigenous outcomes. This poor performance in comparison with the non-Indigenous population is revealed in the proportion of the population with post-secondary qualifications and again in the proportion of Indigenous youth staying at school. The results confirm that the Indigenous population remains severely disadvantaged in the education sector. In younger age groups the non-Indigenous population has a higher participation rate in post-secondary education than the Indigenous population. However, older Indigenous people are actually more likely to be enrolled in a post-secondary course than their non-Indigenous counterparts.