State must focus on Aboriginal schooling

When the nation’s education ministers met in Darwin last month, nit-picking over the national literacy and numeracy benchmarks was on the agenda. According to newspaper reports, the States and Territories did not want to give the school-by-school results to the Commonwealth, but wanted the Commonwealth to fork out $35 million to cover the extra cost of moving to a common test and including Year 9 in the testing.

WA, more than any other jurisdiction, would have been hoping that the achievement of indigenous students against the national benchmarks didn’t come up in the conversation.

This is because the Ministerial Council has discussed indigenous education before and, in 2000, its own Taskforce on Indigenous Education warned it about “lingering perceptions” that the gap in education outcomes between indigenous and non-indigenous schoolchildren was normal and long-term, if not permanent.

WA knows from the latest West Australian Literacy and Numeracy (WALNA) results that its gap between indigenous and non-indigenous students is not permanent; it is widening.

And it knows from the latest National Report on Schooling in Australia that this is not the case in the Northern Territory, Queensland or South Australia, where the gap may not always be closing but at least it is holding steady.

A minimum requirement of a good education is proficiency in English and mathematics. Across Australia, students in Years 3, 5 and 7 are assessed against the national literacy and numeracy benchmarks which represent the minimum level of achievement without which students would have difficulty making sufficient progress in school, let alone thrive.

In WA, the latest WALNA results for 2006 show the percentage of indigenous students achieving these benchmarks has fallen significantly since 2000.

The percentage of indigenous children achieving the reading benchmark has fallen from 87 to 72 per cent for Year 3 and from 71 to 64 per cent for Year 5. The percentage of indigenous students achieving the numeracy benchmark has fallen from 69 to 57 per cent for Year 3 and from 57 to 49 per cent for Year 5.

These are falls of about 10 percentage points, in some cases as much as 15 percentage points. This is not a blip.

Even allowing for statistical noise, it is a deeply troubling trend.

In those remote community schools for which the WA Department of Education reports results, the figures are even worse.

(The Department began reporting individual school results on its website late last year, but it does not report school results for grade cohorts of fewer than 10 children and this naturally excludes the vast majority of remote community schools.)

Ten per cent or less children achieve the numeracy benchmark in many — even most — grades in remote community schools.

The WA Government has recognised a problem with literacy and numeracy and established the Literacy and Numeracy Review Taskforce to provide recommendations, particularly regarding those students failing to meet the minimum benchmarks.

What they need to know is this: it is not enough to run programs that sound good.

Programs must be evaluated based on data.

As Robert Somerville, director of Aboriginal Education Training and Services in WA has said, no matter how popular or well-meaning a program might be, if the data do not show improvements then it is not working.

“We need to set substantial goals and then work to meet them,” he told the Dare to Lead project.

“Rather than saying this is a really cool program we’re running and dodging away from the fact that the results just aren’t there.”

With this in mind, the task force should carefully consider the prospects of literacy education programs First Steps and Getting it Right (now in a limited number of schools) and the Aboriginal Literacy Strategy (now in remote schools in the Kimberley, Pilbara, Mid-West and Goldfields districts).

It should also consider the prospects for Scaffolding Literacy and MULTILIT.

In 1999, Scaffolding Literacy was piloted in the Pilbara, Kimberley and South-West of WA.

The Scaffolding Literacy with Indigenous Children in School report showed that, after one year, it had halved the percentage of non-readers and more than trebled the percentage of children reading at Year 4 to Year 7 levels.

Last year, MULTILIT was piloted in Coen on Queensland’s Cape York.

Noel Pearson announced that, after half a school year, it had brought the children, on average, from more than three years to one year behind the age-appropriate reading accuracy level, and from nearly four years to less than three years behind the ageappropriate comprehension level.

If WA does not want to be earmarked as the worst State for indigenous school education, it needs to start learning from what is working and jettisoning what is not.

Kirsten Storry is a policy analyst on the indigenous affairs research program at The Centre for Independent Studies.