Indigenous-Education-Review_DRAFT

Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory
Bruce Wilson
Territory‐wide learning expectations, providing high‐quality classroom resources,
providing access to high‐quality professional development, and closely monitoring
trends and performances across all schools (Masters, 2011: 33‐34).
There remain unresolved issues in the relationship between regions/directorates and the
centre. Some regions have, for example, supported particular approaches to literacy. The
Barkly has moved towards the adoption of Scaffolded Literacy (which is a rebadged
Accelerated Literacy); Alice Springs has reached agreement with schools about the use of
PM Benchmarks; Katherine has focused on phonemic awareness. Within the current
framework, the review supports decisions like this as a legitimate effort to achieve
consistency and economies of scale in the delivery of support, at least at regional level. A
clear Department strategy would, however, make such approaches redundant.
The whole education system should adopt a consistent approach to key areas for action in
Indigenous education. The Department should provide regions with both a clear policy
framework and a clearly defined role in working with schools to reach agreement on how
agreed approaches will be pursued.
This should take account of differences between schools: as proposed above in the
discussion of the ’two systems’ idea, small and remote schools need a different program
from town schools. But these variations are mostly system‐wide, not regional: a bush
primary school in Alice Springs region is likely to share more with a bush school in Katherine
region than it does with a large primary school in Alice Springs township. So the Department
could specify mandatory elements for bush schools, and different elements, some
mandatory, for town schools, to reflect the differences between kinds of schools in policy
implementation. But it should ignore the regularly expressed view that each school is its
own micro‐climate, requiring every decision to be made locally.
The recommendations in later chapters of the report illustrate how this approach should be
implemented.
Management of Indigenous education
DRAFT
The management of Indigenous education has ebbed and flowed in the Department. It has
been treated sometimes as a separate area of management and sometimes as a
mainstreamed policy focus. Through the early 1990s Indigenous education policy was
managed through the Aboriginal Education Policy Unit, a small unit working on specific
initiatives under the national Aboriginal Education Policy framework. Towards the end of the
1990s, the Aboriginal Education Branch was established and took on responsibility for a
range of programs, including the management of the Indigenous Education Strategic
Initiatives Program (IESIP), which was the source of Commonwealth funding.
The Aboriginal Education Branch eventually became the Indigenous Education Division. With
a rush of policy reform from 2007 onwards, the Division was downsized and briefly became
Remote Schools Policy and Services. This was replaced by structures to manage the Territory
Growth Towns work and the Transforming Indigenous Education initiative. The policy area
for Indigenous education had returned to the size of a small policy unit. This unit
concentrated on the major reform work and all other policy‐ and program‐related work was
led by relevant functional areas. At present there is a small Indigenous education unit and a
related unit responsible for Community Driven Schools, incorporating the Community
Engagement Team (CET).
40