Indigenous-Education-Review_DRAFT

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Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory Bruce Wilson Young people engaged in these programs are (to an extent) fulfilling the legal requirement that they remain at school without benefiting from the moral requirement that they gain something worth having from this imposition. Students are often only minimally literate, largely disengaged from school, attending sporadically, looking forward to the end of their schooling with little prospect of gaining a formal qualification and in many cases without a realistic chance of gaining worthwhile employment locally. Schools in different locations offer students different levels of aspiration. Urban students are usually in an environment where they see people occupying a wide range of adult roles, and where fellow students are aiming for university courses, VET qualifications and professional or qualified trade occupations. Bush students are often in schools where no Indigenous student, or almost none, has completed NTCET or a significant VET qualification, been to university or taken up a professional or significant technical or trade role. This experience inevitably limits their aspirations. As Biddle and Cameron argue, expectations of educational outcomes are an important indicator of early disengagement from education. They note that: …a student’s expectations may be self‐fulfilling. Those who do not expect to complete high school are unlikely to put in much effort at school. [Expectations] are strongly influenced by the characteristics of one’s peers, parents and teachers (Biddle and Cameron, 2011: 24). If the capacity of the remote Indigenous student population is normally distributed, there should be as many teachers, carpenters, nurses, doctors, veterinarians, plumbers and computer programmers emerging from these communities as from all communities. But as Figure 17 above shows, there are not. One response to this situation has been to accept the limited horizon of the local community and initiate VET programs based on local employment opportunities. The weakness of this approach is that it limits the aspirations of whole communities of children to community work or rural operations, or whatever else is available within the boundaries of small communities. VET options are clearly important in engagement and as pointers and pathways to career options. But they should not be limited solely to the local horizon. Students need a strong and realistic sense that they could gain materially from continuing their education, that there are future options beyond what they can see in their local community. For many students in bush settings, this is far from the case now. DRAFT This review believes that despite patches of success and occasional encouraging results from individual schools, the delivery of secondary education outside the larger centres has produced a minimal return for a significant investment. Since Collins, another generation of children in bush schools has largely failed to gain the benefits of a secondary education. This discussion is not intended to be critical of those communities and teachers who have fought to offer a secondary experience to young people in the most remote of settings. The effort, commitment and tenacity of those individuals and groups are admirable, but they are facing impossible odds. The years of effort to expand secondary remote provision since the Collins review have demonstrated that it is not possible to offer a comprehensive and substantial secondary program in most bush settings. 75
Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory Bruce Wilson How to proceed In circumstances of constrained resources, it makes little sense to go on throwing scarce resources at the unequal struggle to provide secondary education in bush schools with tiny numbers of attending secondary students. It would be more rational to allocate resources to a limited number of settings in which there are enough students to generate a high quality program covering a range of education and training needs. Education beyond Year 6 should only be provided in settings that can offer a secondary education including attention to the range of the Australian Curriculum and a suite of VET offerings. The expansion of the range of offerings even in these more populated settings will inevitably require a contribution from distance education providers, along with other forms of flexible provision, but this will only be effective where there are secondary‐trained teachers and trainers able to provide supervision, support and advice to students studying by distance and other flexible modes. Given the wide and thin distribution of remote students in the Territory, the only way to meet these needs is to aggregate students seeking a secondary education into larger groups. The review has identified two models for provision, both of which should be trialled: Remote secondary provision: the provision in a small number of larger bush schools of a program based around VET programs and a coverage of the Australian Curriculum that builds on the VET core. The programs would include significant components of online and distance provision, in turn requiring the development of resources to meet that need. These schools would seek to retain their own students and attract students from smaller nearby schools, homelands and outstations to create a critical mass. Residential facilities: the development of boarding or other residential facilities (or use of existing underused facilities) located close to regional centres (possibly only Darwin, Palmerston, Alice Springs, Katherine, Tennant Creek and Nhulunbuy), bringing students from bush locations to existing schools offering a viable middle years and senior secondary program. A proposal of this kind must recognise and manage the history of boarding and residential arrangements for remote students, a history which, despite some notable successes, has not been generally effective. DRAFT Remote secondary provision The first option has been the subject of considerable developmental work by staff in the Industry, Engagement and Employment Pathways (IEEP) team in the Department of Education. A detailed trial proposal is at Appendix 4. The proposal is to conduct a trial in four schools, two in smaller towns and two in larger bush communities. The trial will run from Year 7 in those schools and progressively engage older students. The proposal is intended to improve NTCET achievement levels and increase qualified job outcomes for students. It aims to provide students with a clear pathway through school to a job and an answer to the question ‘Why come to school?’. Students staying at school through to Year 12 now have three possible pathways. The academic pathway is well understood by educators and determined by rules driven by the need to achieve an Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank (ATAR). The vocational pathway, while less understood, allows a student to achieve compulsory Stage One subjects and then to fill their educational pattern with VET programs. To achieve an NTCET, students will need to 76
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