Opinion & Commentary
Has Indigenous Education Been Shortchanged Again?
The minister for education’s plan to fund two hundred additional teachers with $100 million of support is a commendable response to the Northern Territory’s crisis in Indigenous education. But the minister has been poorly advised. The proposed measures will not come close to delivering Indigenous literacy and numeracy. It would be better to identify effective solutions now than have to make another apology in twenty years.
For the past two years, the Northern Territory Department of Education has reported year 3 and 5 literacy benchmark pass rates of around 90% for non-Indigenous children. For Indigenous children in Darwin and Alice Springs, the pass rate drops to 60%. But for Indigenous children in remote areas, the rate crashes to just 20%. Even this pass rate is overstated: most of the children attending the sixty-two homeland ‘Learning Centres’ have not even been tested for year 3 and 5 benchmarks.
Thirty years of welfare dependence with attendant alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence in Indigenous communities has played a role. Poor school attendance has also been blamed for poor results. But most Indigenous parents are desperate for real education for their kids. Northern Territory school enrolments for 2008 appear to be higher than the 2006 census data (that admittedly probably undercounted the Indigenous population) indicate.
The major reason for poor attendance is that many Indigenous people are offered only pretend education: the product of pseudo-curricula and inadequate teaching. In the few schools where there are effective teachers who ignore the official curriculum for Indigenous children, they attend school and pass the tests.
The separate curricula followed by Indigenous schools are a form of apartheid. When children of non-English-speaking immigrants enrol in Darwin schools, they follow the mainstream curriculum, but take English-as-a-second-language programs. Indigenous parents in the top end want their children taught the mainstream curriculum in English from kindergarten so they can get jobs and participate in society. They know that only literate communities can preserve traditional languages in the modern world. All Commonwealth funding for education in the territory should depend on the condition that Indigenous children are not intellectually segregated, but taught the same curriculum as other children.
The absence of Indigenous teachers in the Northern Territory is another indicator of educational failure. The Northern Territory’s population is 28% Indigenous, but of 4,572 registered teachers there, only 164 (3.6%) identify as Aborigines or Torres Strait Islanders. Of these, only sixty-three (1.4% of the total) have completed the normal four-year course of education required to qualify as a teacher. Most of the other 101 Indigenous teachers have been registered (together with another six hundred non-Indigenous teachers) without such qualifications. These seven hundred underqualified teachers are concentrated in the sixty-two ‘Learning Centres’ and in the ‘Community Education Centres’ that act as substitutes for schools in predominantly Indigenous communities. These teachers have not been assisted to upgrade their qualifications to current standards, and there is no provision in the new Commonwealth legislation for them to do so.
The Bill allocates $18.406 million for the creation of 190 Department of Education jobs for former Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) participants—a change long overdue. In contrast to teachers’ aides in mainstream schools, who help children in classes taught by qualified teachers, Indigenous teachers’ aides in Learning Centres are often the only people in front of the class. Many of the CDEP teachers’ aides would not pass the year 7 literacy test. What steps are being taken to assist these teachers’ aides to become literate and numerate?
The planned funding does not include housing for additional teachers outside Darwin. At current Northern Territory housing costs, this would require another $22.5 million in 2008 and $67.5 million by 2011. Such funding—$90 million in total—would almost double the planned commitment.
Because of past policies, more than 5,000 of the nearly 8,000 Indigenous teenagers in the Northern Territory cannot pass the national literacy benchmarks. Nor could another 5,000 men and women in their twenties. The accumulated backlog of insufficiently literate Indigenous young people is 10,000—they represent the future of Indigenous communities.
No part of the present education system can accommodate teenagers with year 1 literacy. They cannot sit side by side with six-year-olds or in a class of teenagers from the mainstream education system. To bring these Indigenous teenagers to the stage where they could access mainstream jobs and further education would require one or two years of sheltered accommodation in an English-speaking environment, intensive tutoring, and part-time employment. The minimum cost would be $50,000 a year for each student. The real cost of remedying past failed policies would therefore be between $500 million and $1 billion.
There is clearly a lack of any remedial action on this scale. Even partial solutions will require more funds than have been committed. Parents of students that do not pass benchmark tests are entitled to vouchers worth $700 a year to have their children tutored. This program assumes literate parents and access to qualified tutors. Parents in one remote Indigenous community have therefore asked the federal government if they could aggregate these vouchers and use them together with foundation funds to pay for a remedial teacher for their children. They have not even received the courtesy of a reply.
Professor Helen Hughes is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. An account of her experiences of Indigenous Territorians’ education problems appears in the current issue of Quadrant.
