Indigenous-Education-Review_DRAFT

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Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory Bruce Wilson This review has identified a significant proportion of bush schools that depended for their effective leadership on external support from one or the other model. These are often the schools experiencing the greatest difficulty in managing community engagement, negotiating Department rules and procedures, dealing with staff and student management issues and addressing a range of curriculum, assessment and reporting responsibilities. In the best cases, principals or teaching principals with little experience in senior roles were effectively counselled and supported by experienced principals available to them through the model. The roles of Directors of School Performance also offer support of this kind, but their support is usually spread too thin to make the kind of difference needed for many inexperienced school leaders. Although most school leaders were relatively positive about the roles of DSPs, there was a general view that they had limited contact with the more remote schools. The DSPs also have a degree of potential conflict between their roles in supporting and reviewing principals and schools. There were signs in more than one school that this potential had become real. The review proposes specific forms of support for schools in areas where changes are recommended (e.g. literacy coaches for bush schools). Evidence also suggests support for a systematic and substantial program to ensure that school leaders in bush schools have access to experienced and capable principals to assist them in skill development and to provide advice on issues they face in their role. Consistent with the two systems idea, support should be targeted to bush schools in a different form from town schools. The implementation of the Australian Curriculum illustrates the point. Town schools have a level of staffing and infrastructure that mostly will allow them to make a considered judgment about how to implement the Australian Curriculum, so long as some broad policy parameters are set and moderate levels of external support are provided. Many bush schools are not in this position. The Department should target levels and kinds of support (e.g. supporting materials, professional learning and coaches) that reflect the difficulties faced by principals and staff in these settings. DRAFT The current review proposes that where high quality evidence‐based resources are available, they should be mandatory for bush schools. The implementation of more consistent approaches to literacy is an example of this. The review supports the mandatory specification of materials for bush schools to ensure that they are not in the position of having to design their own approach to implementation without the time or resources to do the job properly. The Department should support those programs in which it has confidence, and not others. An education system of this size, with the constrained resources available to it, must be disciplined in using those resources to support a limited set of priorities and action programs. It should not be tempted to broaden its focus or to support a multitude of competing approaches. Data and evidence Measuring achievement against strategic goals depends on good data and evidence. The Northern Territory Department has struggled for years with the challenges of distributed schools systems, poor data quality and incomplete data. It now has in place a sophisticated, flexible, robust and user‐centred data system and high quality validated data in many areas 43
Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory Bruce Wilson including enrolment, attendance and significant areas of student achievement. It also has a systemic commitment to develop additional datasets and use data for monitoring and planning. There remain areas, however, in which the Department has yet to accept a collective responsibility for data management. One pressing area concerns data about what is happening in schools. This report noted above that there were many key areas in which there were no common expectations or requirements of schools. Similarly, in some core areas, the system still has no common expectations about the categories of data that schools should collect and report on. The Department does not have systematic, comprehensive data about core issues in schools including for example, curriculum and assessment. The engine is now in place to manage these categories of data; what is required is a management decision to collect and use data categories that are critical to the enterprise. The review has also identified a consistent view that despite continuing efforts to undertake evaluation, there are many program areas lacking clear and unambiguous evidence to measure success. This was certainly the impression of the reviewer. In many key areas data about effectiveness were uneven, unreliable or absent. This reflects the difficulty in collecting data and conducting robust evaluation in the Northern Territory: the same constraints and barriers that inhibit the delivery of education to Indigenous children also impede data collection and the management of effective evaluation. As the Australian Medical Association (AMA) notes, the common problem with the evaluation of intervention programs designed for Indigenous people is ‘high rates of attrition, casting doubt on [their] effectiveness and wider applicability’ (AMA, 2013: 7). Similarly, the Maximising Improvements in Literacy and Numeracy (MILaN) review referred to ‘the shortage of large scale assessments’ giving school leaders reliable evidence about what works (Tremblay, 2012: 25). Despite this, whenever initiatives are to be trialled or implemented, a commitment should be made to evaluation, preferably longitudinal where feasible and appropriate. DRAFT Where the Department receives external requests to conduct research in schools, decisions should be based on clearly stated criteria including that the research should contribute to the Department’s strategic goals and cause minimal disruption to school practice and that all results of the research will be freely available to the Department for evaluation and planning purposes. Rigorous efforts should be made to manage and minimise the overall research load on schools. If the conduct of research has the effect, as it sometimes has, of making the underlying tasks of schools more difficult, the research should not be permitted. Recommendations 2. Develop a 10‐year strategic plan for Indigenous education with long term goals and interim targets and ensure that it drives action at regional and school level. 3. Establish a strong Indigenous Education unit led by a dedicated senior official to develop the strategic plan, design trials, lead community engagement, support and monitor implementation and report on progress. 44
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