Opinion & Commentary
Northern Territory Indigenous Education
The Northern Territory Department of Education reported in 2006-2007 that reading and numeracy Year 3, 5 and 7 benchmark passes for remote Indigenous students average less than half those for non-Indigenous students. For 2004-5, the last year that figures for remote Indigenous children were published, the average passes for remote Indigenous children were 20% compared to 90% for non-Indigenous children. These figures were overly optimistic for Indigenous children because if teachers thought that Homeland children would not pass, they did not permit them to sit the benchmark tests. Many Homelands children have thus never been tested. Where Indigenous children in remote Learning Centres have been independently tested by qualified teachers, the test results showed that most Indigenous children were leaving primary school with the numeracy and literacy of five and six year-old mainstream children.
Next month all Australian children will be tested at Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 for literacy and numeracy. Mr Rudd has promised that progress on closing the gap on literacy and numeracy outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians will be reported on the first day of Federal Parliament each year. Parents will have to ensure that all their children are tested so that they can monitor their progress. Pass rates, together with the numbers of children enrolled, will also have to be published for every school for Years 3, 5, 7, and 9 so that parents can see how schools are performing and so that Mr Rudd can fulfill his promise by reference to the May 2008 benchmark test result base.
The failure of education in remote communities has been known for at least a decade. It has also been known that without English, literacy and numeracy, youngsters cannot get jobs. Clerks and administrators in remote communities are overwhelmingly non-Indigenous as are the electricians, plumbers, construction and other workers who service these communities. Mines, shops and tourist enterprises are struggling to find literate and numerate Indigenous school leavers to train and employ. Yet the Northern Territory persists with a separate system of education for Aborigines that leaves school leavers unable to read a street sign, count up purchases and check the instructions on a package of medicine let alone apply for a job.
Commitment to separate education for Aborigines is the underlying reason for persistent failure. Aboriginal schools are often poorly maintained. They not only lack educational equipment such as DVDs, but books. There is generally one large laminated text for a mixed age class. Some schools do not have enough room for all the children enrolled. Some do not even have electricity and ablution blocks.
Yet material deprivation is the least of the Aboriginal schools’ problems. Separate Aboriginal curriculums and separate teaching standards causes educational failure.
What is considered to be ‘cultural appropriateness’ has ruled curriculum development for Aboriginal children. Schooling is thus supposed to start with 15% instruction in English until bilingual parity is reached at the end of primary school. But literacy is not available in vernacular languages. Mental arithmetic, times tables and other maths drills have been replaced by ‘culturally relevant’ mathematics. In practice this means that teenagers can only count up to 10 because they have to use their fingers to add and subtract. Youngsters who have attended 10 years of school – whenever it has been open – have no idea of geography, history, science or any other field of knowledge.
Drive-in and fly-in teachers mean that many Learning Centres only operate a few hours a day and a few days a week. They have shorter terms than mainstream schools. Whole-word reading has its critics in mainstream schools, but where English is a second language the guessing involved in identifying words in the absence of phonetics becomes mystifying, closing minds to learning. The only person actually in front of a class is often a Teachers’ Aide with minimal English, literacy and numeracy.
In marked contrast, some dedicated, qualified full-time resident teachers achieve excellent teaching results and help communities to deal with the bureaucracies that rule them. These teachers complain that they often have to break Northern Territory Department of Education rules.
The Rudd Government has provided $64 million for 200 additional teachers, but the Northern Territory will have to find another $90 million to house them if they are to be deployed in remote communities. Funds have also been provided to move Teachers’ Aides from CDEP (Community Development Employment Projects) to Department of Education payrolls. This move is long overdue, but the $3.5 million for teacher training falls far short of the funding needed to enable unqualified teachers to register with the Northern Territory Registration Board.
Because most primary school leavers cannot handle the school work in a mainstream secondary school, Aboriginal secondary classes have to be devoted to remedial English, literacy and numeracy. Secondary curriculum content may thus be as low as Year 3 of the Northern Territory Curriculum Framework. With the decline of unskilled jobs, youngsters need Year 10 levels of education to be able to go to work and learn on the job, take up apprenticeships and attend TAFE courses, or go to Year 12 and higher education. In the rest of Australia increasing numbers of Indigenous students are enrolling in TAFEs and universities. For Northern Territory Indigenous youngsters these are still far horizons.
A decade of educational failure has accumulated a backlog of 5,000 teenagers and 5,000 young men and women in their twenties who cannot read, write or count and are therefore unemployable. Remedial English, literacy and numeracy is urgently needed for these youngsters if they are not to become another lost generation.
Remote community parents are desperate for mainstream education for their children so that they can get good jobs and live decent lives. They argue that they teach their children their language and traditions at home and in the community and want their children taught in English from kindergarten. They are asking for the full-time resident teachers to which they are entitled by Northern Territory rules. But when they want to advertise to attract qualified, dedicated teachers to their communities, unlike neighbouring non-Indigenous schools, they are not allowed to do so. Until Indigenous school communities are allowed to advertise for full-time, resident teachers, it will remain evident that there is one rule for Aboriginal schools and another for non-Indigenous schools in the Northern Territory.
Professor Emeritus Helen Hughes is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. Her Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory is available at www.cis.org.au
