Why it’s time to overhaul the NT’s dysfunctional education bureaucracy

Aboriginal students with assistant teacher Roslyn Malngumba in the classroom during a class at Mapuru, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.

If there is one major finding The Australian’s recent NT Schools in Crisis series highlighted, it is that the Northern Territory education system needs to be overhauled – and the federal government must intervene to ensure this happens.

That 90 per cent of remote Aboriginal students across the Northern Territory are not meeting minimal performance standards against national numeracy and literacy assessments indicates an education system in crisis.

Coupled with ever-falling school attendance rates, especially since 2017, this tells us urgent reform is needed across the public education system.

The education crisis in the Territory hits graphically because about 40 per cent of all students are Aboriginal and live in communities where English is a second or third language, where pathways of education and training do not flow easily into post-school opportunities.

Against this depressing and unsustainable backdrop, successive federal education ministers have called for new ways of responding to the national performance results that have been evident since testing began in 2008. This has always been done with scant details of how this might look beyond the ongoing reform agenda that drives national schooling reforms.

Across the past 20 years the NT Department of Education has sought to address this underperformance through a range of strategies. Most of these actions have resulted in a seismic growth in the central bureaucracy, with an abandonment of regional offices providing direct support to schools, only to be followed by decentralisation back to regional offices to address the lack of support received by remote schools.

A Teach in the Territory for a Term program to attract teachers to discover the “wonders” of the Territory resulted in teachers staying for a term only and leaving remote students with interrupted learning opportunities.

Across this period a high turnover of chief executives also occurred, each bringing their own agenda that usually included dismantling the organisational and policy structures of the previous regime through often uninformed and personalised opinions and occasional reviews by consultants from interstate, many of whom had no background in the educational issues facing remote communities.

During this period silver bullets abounded.

One approach included the banning of bilingual education, which devalued language and culture as a mainstay of the curriculum for Aboriginal students.

Another involved the implementation of the federally funded Direct Instruction literacy program into 25 remote schools, which resulted in a decrease in student attendance at most of the schools participating in the program. More recently we’ve also seen the axing of the Centre for School Leadership, run in partnership with Charles Darwin University, which the new Education Minister participated in when employed by the NT Department of Education.

A key outcome of these haphazard strategies has been an ideological free fall, where poor educational offerings and their outcomes have become entrenched and normalised.

Martina Mullumbuk, an assistant teacher in training to become a full teacher through the Growing Our Own project.

As described in The Australian’s NT Schools in Crisis coverage, this dynamic has produced a bloating of the Department of Education, where the needs and wants of the bureaucracy (and government) have exceeded the needs of remote community schooling, resulting in the steady deepening of institutional racism, where Aboriginal participation in education services has become virtually non-existent at the highest levels of leadership and governance.

Central education bureaucracy has become an antiquated entity of managers, rather than leaders, unable to shift without significant intervention and redesign.

Aboriginal families in the Northern Territory situate along the fault line where race and wealth inequality intersect and are subjected to a generic form of education policy based on the premise of “one size fits all”. This has clearly failed.

So, what then is a new paradigm that will improve student performance in Western education through Indigeneity, rather than despite it?

Two tenets can be briefly highlighted. The first is to recognise that cultural identity matters, and program instruction and learning in remote NT Aboriginal schools must be developed around the community language and cultural needs. Learning programs, such as the various forms of bilingual education, should be developed and implemented by community members.

A recent 2021 example of the functionality of this policy was the successful completion of eight year 12 students from the remote Yirrkala School with tertiary admission scores that enabled entry into most Australian universities. This achievement was undertaken through a two-way bilingual model driven by the community.

The second tenet to highlight is that competent leadership and governance, when framed with increased accountability, is a cornerstone that leads to improved policy design and performance.

This is particularly so in education, and it is in this area the NT Department of Education has struggled in recent years with the dearth of Aboriginal senior executives represented in the bureaucratic structure and key decision-making forums in the department.

For example, a former department chief executive, on his appointment, terminated a successful tailored executive learning program for Aboriginal employees, resulting in many of those in the program leaving the organisation.

It is instructive to note that several former and current government schools in Arnhem Land have or are becoming independent schools run by the local community, thereby escaping from the lack of service supports and “one size fits all” policy frameworks implemented by the Department of Education.

While the NT government has sought to meet this shift in community self-determinism by implementing a series of Local Decision-Making agreements in areas such as health, justice, economic development and housing with several remote communities across the NT, there is only one agreement in education and that is making very slow progress.

The evidence is clear. The NT Department of Education has long functioned as a handbrake on the progress of Aboriginal education in remote areas. If left to its own devices the department will continue this trajectory. A 21st-century Aboriginal education reform paradigm is required, and it needs to happen now.

Dr Gary Fry is an Aboriginal academic and associate professor of First Nations studies at CQUniversity, and a former senior school principal in the NT. Dr Kevin Gillan is an education consultant employed by the Anindilyakwa Land Council.