Yirara College staff doing indigenous students’ work, say teachers
Ex-teachers claim some staff at the NT’s Yirara College are writing students’ work for them.
Former teachers at Australia’s largest all-indigenous boarding school say staff are routinely writing students’ work for them and 30 senior students are forced to share seven laptops for online courses.
The claims, denied by the school, come as the 12th Closing The Gap report last week highlighted successive government failures to diminish indigenous disadvantage, with only two of the seven goals on track to be met.
Former Yirara College teacher Ralph Folds said it was not uncommon for teachers at the Alice Springs school to allow students to copy completed work.
“You’ve got a situation where teachers are simply not up to the job and no one wants to look like a failure so in the early grades there is an enormous amount of fudging going on,” he told The Australian.
“Inexperienced teachers are trying to teach mainstream approaches in challenging cross-cultural situations. There is a pretence of learning that is going on because the kids are not engaged.”
Mr Folds said former students had gone on to job placements with primary-school levels of literacy and been unable to complete their placements. “They couldn’t do the work assigned to them and realised the qualifications they had were worthless.
“They were shamed.”
Another former teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, said one senior teacher would tell a student preparing for his National Trade Certificate what to type for a school assessment.
Yirara College chairman Tim Stollznow denied teachers completed students’ work, saying the practice was against school policy.
Students from remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland travel hundreds of kilometres to board at Yirara. Some towns they come from have some of the worst living conditions in Australia.
The college houses more than 200 students from more than 40 communities. Up to 25 language groups are represented, with 99 per cent of its students having English as a second language.
The college estimates that less than 10 per cent of its students have completed a full primary school education.
Mr Folds said he was also frustrated by what he described as inadequate technology for senior students. He said in 2019, 30 senior students (Years 11 and 12) were forced to share seven computers for required Basic Key Skills Builder online maths and English classes. “It slowed things down because you had to rotate kids through the laptops. It was ridiculously inadequate, particularly for online studies. The kids were amazingly patient and I was so impressed with them.”
The Australian has spoken to another former teacher who also said 30 senior students were required to share the seven laptops.
The teacher described it as a “constant battle” to use the computer lab and a scramble to find an adequate number of laptops to teach classes. The teacher said often the majority of the lesson was spent trying to get IT to help with internet issues on old laptops.
In response, Yirara College said it had 130 personal computers, of which 26 were laptops.
Yirara is funded by the federal and Northern Territory government model. Families of students do not pay any out-of-pocket expenses, with the school covering board, uniforms and outings.
Latest figures from the government-run My School website says the college gets $42,967 per student annually. Part of the funding comes from AbStudy, payments for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander students or apprentices. Commonwealth funding for independent schools takes into account parents’ abilities to pay for children’s education, with remote schools with large Aboriginal cohorts getting funds at the top end.
Mr Folds, who has more than 30 years’ experience teaching in the NT, said inexperienced teachers and a high staff turnover led to disengaged students.
“Teaching Aboriginal students is a specialty. A lot of mainstream things just don’t work in teaching Aboriginal students. There is no innovation that goes on when they should be leading the way in remote Australia.”
The school is operated by the Lutheran Church of Central Australia’s Finke River Mission. It was founded by the commonwealth government in 1973 and since 1993 has been run by the Finke River Mission, whose work in Central Australia can be traced to the arrival of German Lutheran missionaries from South Australia in 1877. My School website’s NAPLAN data for the college shows its students performed above or substantially above schools with “similar students” in all areas, except grammar, in 2018.
“Yirara is a unique school in the Australian landscape … the college has facilitated hundreds of indigenous kids from remote communities to live a better life,” Mr Stollznow said.
The federal Education Department has distanced itself from the allegations while an NT Education Department spokesman said non-government schools must comply with regulations in the Education Act.
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