Indigenous-Education-Review_DRAFT

Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory
Bruce Wilson
Very remote primary school attendance is the strongest with 29% of students attending over
80% of the time. The lowest attendance band (0 to 20% or 1 day or less per week) is the
most common band for students at preschool, middle and senior schools.
Figure 8 – Very Remote Indigenous Students by Stage of Schooling and Attendance Band 9
Per cent of Students
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Preschool Primary Middle Senior
Stage of Schooling
Source: DoE data from Student Activity v3.0 database
0‐ 20%
21‐40%
41‐60%
61‐80%
81‐100%
Achievement
It is in student achievement that the differences are most dramatic. The review
commissioned a new set of NAPLAN data from Australian Curriculum, Assessment and
Reporting Authority (ACARA), based on the NAPLAN mean scale scores (MSS), equivalent to
individual student raw scores. ACARA was asked to provide national data with the Northern
Territory scores removed to enable comparison of results for the Northern Territory with the
rest of Australia and specific cohorts with like cohorts in the rest of Australia. This gives a
measure of the relative performance of students in very remote schools where Northern
Territory Indigenous students make up 44% of the national Indigenous very remote
population.
DRAFT
Figure 4 represents the results. The red cells are those where the Northern Territory does
worse than the rest of Australia; the green cells represent better performance in the
Northern Territory: the darker the colour, the greater the difference in achievement. Each
cell shows the result for a specific cohort (e.g. very remote Indigenous Year 3 students) on a
specific NAPLAN domain compared with equivalent students in the rest of Australia.
The top half of Figure 9 refers to comparisons of Indigenous student performance. It shows
that the Northern Territory Indigenous cohort performs worse than equivalent cohorts in
the rest of Australia across all geolocations, year levels and domains. No group of Indigenous
students in the Northern Territory does as well as its equivalent in the rest of Australia.
By geolocation, however, some stark differences emerge. In provincial and remote settings,
the underperformance of Northern Territory students is relatively minor. While the
difference amounts to up to a year of schooling in a small number of cells, it is mostly within
a few months of schooling.
9 Note data is for the 2013 school year with partial results for term 4
32