Ideas@TheCentre
Indigenous education ‘gap’ a cover up for policy failure
Governments have been setting targets to ‘close the gap’ in Indigenous education for the past 20 years, and yet literacy and numeracy have not improved. Despite providing $100 million in funding for Indigenous education in the Northern Territory last year, 1000 youngsters left the school system unable to read, write or count.
There is no ‘gap’ between the literacy and numeracy of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Instead, there is an appalling chasm between most of the remote schools attended by Indigenous children and other Australian schools no matter where they are located.
In 2008, 25% of Indigenous students failed the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests in remote and very remote New South Wales, 50% failed in South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland, and more than 75% failed in the Northern Territory. In the Northern Territory, 20% of Indigenous students attending remote schools did not sit the tests. When those not sitting are included with those who failed, nearly 100% of students in Northern Territory remote Indigenous schools did not pass the tests.
In Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, Indigenous children performed like other Australian children with failure rates of barely 10%. This shows that there is no ‘gap’ between the literacy and numeracy of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children.
By masking the problem as an ethnic gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, government targets have moved backwards from ‘fix the problem in four years’ in 1997 to ‘fix half the problems in 10 years’ in 2008.
To close the ‘gap,’ politically painful and tough policy decisions need to be made. The Labor government must honour its election promise to publish NAPLAN data school-by-school. The 44 Home Learning Centres in the Northern Territory must be converted into schools.
Australia has the resources to reform remote Indigenous education; all it needs now is the political will to do so.
Professor Helen Hughes is a Senior Fellow at the CIS. Revisiting Indigenous Education by Helen Hughes and Mark Hughes was released by CIS this week.
