Lesson of the direct approach

ABORIGINAL children are learning well under Cape York academy guidance.

Ex Cairns to the Australian - 18.06.2014. Pics by Brian Cassey Hopevale School and Direct Instruction - story Nicholas Rothwell - photos by Brian Cassey Hopevale School Principal Finn Buckey with pupils at the school.

THE school bell rings outside the classrooms on a damp morning in Hope Vale, the children stream in, 100 of them, all wearing their smart mauve uniform shirts — ­almost full attendance, as usual, these days in this education-­obsessed community on the east coast of far north Queensland’s Cape York.

At once, the lessons start: taut, intense affairs, teachers and small groups of pupils closely engaged: reading, mathematics, concepts, comprehension, reinforced repeatedly, each step gone over, each one double-checked. What word? Again. What number? Again. Again.

In such a milieu, with the cues so concentrated, it’s almost ­impossible for a child not to learn.

The emerging triumph of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy, the three-campus venture set up in 2010 through local leader Noel Pearson’s efforts, shows that there is a viable way out of remote indigenous Australia’s protracted education crisis; it shows, too, that Aboriginal children from community backgrounds can be taught constructively, and nothing need restrict their advancement in the world of knowledge.

The evidence for this conclusion is mounting. The picture will be plainer still this September, when the results from the ­NAPLAN tests held last month are released: it is the first ­NAPLAN the Cape Academy schools have prepared for, and the first taken by Year 3 students who have been taught solely by the academy’s concerted method.

Results tell much of the tale: Direct Instruction, the American education system being pioneered in Aboriginal Australia on Cape York — and long championed by Pearson in his impassioned texts — is a strikingly effective answer to the remote community literacy and numeracy crisis.

DI is a formula that, when ­applied with rigour, achieves strong outcomes everywhere: it works equally well in the poorest districts of Chicago and the most disadvantaged minority regions of New Mexico.

The first test of DI before any wider rollout, the proof of the method at schools in the remote bush, is on the verge of completion now in the classrooms of Hope Vale, Coen and Aurukun, but the greater battle, to convince the politicians and bureaucrats who preside over national education policies and funding directives, is still at a critical point of impasse.

On first assessment, this might seem a strange state of affairs. After all, Tony Abbott, the self-proclaimed “prime minister for ­indigenous policy”, has been a keen supporter of Pearson’s ideas, and a committed friend of the CYAAA.

A year before the federal election, he took a group of business leaders on a “books and mortar” working bee to Aurukun, the ­largest of the academy’s camp­uses, and described it then in its first phase of DI instruction as “a school transformed”.

In the run-up to the 2013 poll, he pledged $22 million to support an expansion of DI teaching across indigenous Australia. It was widely expected that the dawn of an Abbott government would see the rise of Pearson’s star.

The arguments for the new ­approach Pearson supported were already plainly expressed: the ­initial outcomes could be ­inspected on the ground. It was a simple enough plan: its components ­interlocked.

The Cape York welfare reform project, launched in four communities in 2007, was aimed at combating the noxious effects of passive welfare and alcohol abuse through a linked set of interventions. Its key innovation was the Family Responsibilities Commission, a panel of community leaders, backed by a retired magistrate, that had the power to manage the welfare income of parents who were failing to send their children to school. A range of distinct economic programs backed the FRC — but the linchpin of its work was the CYAAA.

The reform blueprint’s architects were convinced effective education required good tuition and high attendance. To that end, two or three “case managers” were attached to each school, specialists with the task of ensuring students were sent to class every day.

These carefully calibrated initiatives have been influential far ­beyond the Cape; they have been much discussed, and copied, but applied only piecemeal, altered and watered down.

Thus, when the federal government launched its large-scale ­intervention in the Northern Territory in mid-2007, it borrowed the fledgling FRC model, and launched compulsory income management across the remote bush. But the FRC is a panel of ­locals, assessing members of their own communities: Canberra put departmental officials in charge of welfare income control, and so created a large, unwieldy administrative enterprise.

In place of a campaign to build personal ­responsibility, it imposed official controls. This statist reinterpretation of Pearson’s brainchild was bipartisan. The inter-vention scheme was born under John Howard’s Mal Brough, and repeatedly reviewed and re-engineered by Labor.

It has lingered on to this day, but the budget handed down last month effectively killed it off in silence by terminating all income management funds after June next year: it is an open secret in the bureaucracy that a work-for-the-dole scheme will be rolled out in its place.

With that decision the flagship indigenous policy reform of the past decade dies, and $400 million is saved across the forward estimates period, and not a word is said. The federal and Northern Territory governments also made attempts during the past five years to tie welfare income to school attendance after the FRC’s example. Abbott himself seized on this strand of the Cape York project when he came to office last September and launched a remote area schools anti-truancy scheme.

But one feature of the Cape York program has not been adopted or copied until now: DI itself, the sole element of the reform scheme that is immediately transferable, cost neutral and of proven effectiveness. Hope Vale is the best place to take the measure of DI’s impact. The two original campuses of the CYAAA, Aurukun and Coen, were immediate successes when DI came in, for different reasons: Aurukun had been an unruly, ill-attended school and the initial improvements were spectacular, while little Coen’s school had always been a star institution. Hope Vale’s experience was distinctive. It had been a Lutheran mission: education was at a premium there in past decades, but in the welfare era standards had fallen away. It was Pearson’s home, and he cast a long shadow; indeed, the community was divided over some elements of his welfare reform project — but after a year of watching DI and its results elsewhere on the Cape, Hope Vale parents approached the CYAAA and invited it in.

Today, daily attendance at the Hope Vale school is well above 90 per cent, and the children not in the classrooms are almost always absent on medical grounds and accounted for. Principal Finn Buckley has a staff of 12 teachers, two of them highly experienced locals, and seven full-time instructional aides drawn from the community. In the hallways, noticeboards display the academy’s urgent slogans. In addition to its trademark triplet, “Get Ready, Work Hard, Be Good”, there are more specific messages for the classroom: “Be respectful”, “Speak nicely”, “Be a learner”.

Photos show the students; each child holds up a placard, displaying their ambitions: “When I grow up I want to be …” Amid the would-be footballers and truck drivers there are some intriguing choices: doctor, lawyer, cardiologist. Grand ambitions, fuelled by the experience of learning day to day. At ground level, though, for the Hope Vale families, DI’s chief breakthrough is its strategy of teaching the students in the classrooms at their achievement level, not according to their grade or age.

The Aboriginal former principal at the Coen CYAAA school, Cheryl Cannon, has seen the change take place: “Having children taught in their ability groups is so much better for them,” she says. “And I find that parents are happy with what’s happening, their children can read and write, they’re not shame and shy, they’re confident, they’re willing to speak up in public and take risks.”

Hope Vale parent Jenny Gibson sees this effect in her own family: “The model works,” she says. “Children just need the basics, sleep, a stable home, parents ready to get them to school, and then with DI everything falls into place.” Her young daughter Lizzie comes home from school bursting with facts to tell, with questions to ask: mother and child read together and spend time on the computer together every night. Her older daughter Maggie has just gradu­ated from Hope Vale’s top class and gone on to boarding school at Stuartholme in Brisbane’s Toowong: “That’s always a hard thing for children from a community, but she’s found her place and settled in: her literacy and numeracy levels were at a point where she could adapt to a new place and new way of learning.”

Joanne Bowen’s bustling family home is also a laboratory for DI’s effects. She has six children, and cares for two further child safety program wards from neighbouring communities. Her eldest three left Hope Vale to board in southern cities before DI’s advent: the younger three, aged nine, eight and seven, are all at the school now, studying on the DI curriculum. They share a single maths class despite their age differences: one of the three, Skye, is a star performer and has won the attendance prize two years in a row.

“My younger three are more confident in their knowledge,” Bowen says. “They’re focused. I feel blessed. To me, education comes first. We’re not here for a long time in life, it’s a short time, and we want our children to learn at the first opportunity, go down that road of learning — so they can survive.”

Lillian Bowen is a well-known specialist in the region’s Guugu Yimidhirr language, and has taught at Hope Vale for 27 years. She went to the local school when it was run by Lutherans; so did her mother, who was taught to write by the missionaries using slate-rock for a writing pad and a sea-­urchin spine as pen.

“I’ve seen generations come and go, and I can tell the difference,” she says. “It’s true that when we first came to using DI here, there were a few people who were rising up against it, and some are still coming to terms with it now, but I can see it working. I see these children learning to read and write when they’re young. My own children left this school barely able to read and write. It’s for the sake of the future generations that we’re adopting this DI.”

Such is the picture on the frontline: after a lengthy absence, the wonder and the delight of learning have come back to these communities, and into scores of homes. But this is a beginning to the story, rather than an end. DI is an opened doorway, not a magic cure for community travails and ills. These still affect schooling.

At the end of last year the CYAAA prepared an initial review of its own performance, and pro­gress towards its goal of achieving nationally high standards within six to 10 years. It is a startling document, one of the very few reviews of Aboriginal community-based programs written with unsparing honesty, by authors who wish to know the true state of things, not gloss them over for their superiors and funding providers. It details the difficulty the academy schools have in “catching up” to the standards of mainstream education, the problems patchy attendance rates or disruptive behaviour patterns still cause, and the unseen factors, such as learning in a second language, that also hinder tuition progress.

Indigenous Cape York’s social and medical profile is in line with other remote Aboriginal regions: recent figures suggest almost 15 per cent of children and teen­agers there suffer from otitis media, a disease that can cause grave hearing impairment; allegations of child abuse and neglect have been made in connection with more than 12 per cent of the child population; almost 8 per cent are diagnosed with “failure to thrive”; and 1.5 per cent show the effects of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

“The needs of these students are under-identified, under-report­ed and under-treated,” the CYAAA review says. “There is likely a significant cohort of students who have undiagnosed conditions … Lack of treatment is affecting the physical, social, psychological and emotional development of these children. Lack of diagnosis has resulted in a significant under-resourcing of special needs. Diagnosis is required to identify the scale of the problem.”

Bleak details! Forward into this landscape, step by slow step, remote area teachers must advance — but so far the arrival of a Prime Minister exquisitely aware of conditions in Cape York and the progress being made there has yielded scant benefit for the bush.

The Abbott administration’s chaotic track record in the crisis management of remote Aboriginal Australia during its first year in office has gone largely without scrutiny until now, for several reasons. The political Left has relaxed its focus on indigenous affairs since Labor lost power; a general compassion fatigue limits media interest; and the outpouring of official propaganda on initiatives in remote regions has scaled new heights even as crucial decisions are veiled from public view.

On gaining power Abbott immediately reorganised the indigenous affairs bureaucracy, transferring whole sub-departments into his own, which was vastly inflated in size as a result.

Unseemly witch-hunts have targeted senior officials who decided matters in the Labor years, which now seem like a lost golden age of support for consultation and community development. As a ­result of these campaigns and purges there has been a sharp run-down in institutional capacity and ­experience.

Meanwhile, overt responsibility for Aboriginal policy has been diffused: the new Indigenous Advisory Council, headed by Warren Mundine, meets rarely, but Mundine serves as a high-profile commentator, alternately berating and praising the government, clad in the mantle of its authority but without connection to its decision-making. The Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion, is in effect the minister for publicity about indigenous affairs. The chief program he advertises is Abbott’s bizarre truancy initiative, the “remote school attendance strategy”. Indigenous education is thus the present special focus of the commonwealth, the field where Abbott’s appointees must prevail and produce victory statistics — the field of contest where rivals advance their different programs and contend for influence.

The RSAS itself, as the Prime Minister’s particular enterprise, has already become the most visible symbol of the new government’s Aboriginal interests: with much fanfare, an army of 400 anti-truancy workers has been enlisted to enforce attendance at 17 poorly performing bush schools, and funded to the tune of $46.5m — money quietly taken from the Community Development Fund.

The chosen schools self-report their statistics to regional nodes of the Prime Minister’s department: the reported figures are almost useless in many cases, as they mask great differences between male and female attendance in various age groups. There is an uptick in school-going but no increase in teaching resources or change in teaching method — and even on the data sent back from the bush, the performance is mixed. Gunbalanya school in western Arnhem Land has an enrolment of just more than 300 students, and no fewer than 11 attendance officers, all community locals, in effect being paid to send their family members to school. The report for the most recent term is studded with little notes blaming bad weekly figures on “poor attendance by the remote school attendance strategy team”.

One large desert community’s manager describes the truancy scheme in brisk fashion: “The whole program is a shambles and reflects its origins as a political stunt by people who know nothing about education and less about the specialised field of school attendance.” Scullion pointedly hired Pearson’s bitter foe in the Aboriginal education realm, Chris Sarra, to oversee the RSAS.

Meanwhile, other add-on education ventures have been grinding ahead in the margins of the commonwealth’s $700m worth of dedicated spending on indigenous schooling. Teach for Australia, the favourite program of Scullion’s deputy as minister, Alan Tudge, a former deputy director of Pearson’s Cape York Institute, has secured continued funding to send experts to teach in disadvantaged areas, including regions of the NT.

The Home Interaction Program for Parents and Youngsters, a preschool scheme delivered by the Brotherhood of St Laurence and targeted at Aboriginal families, has been given $100m to expand into remote communities, including many in the NT and remote Cape York. The Clontarf Academy, a football-based program that engages almost 3000 male high school students, remains a favourite of both federal and state education departments.

Most spectacular of these government-backed non-governmental projects is the widely publicised Australian Indigenous Education Foundation, which funds scholarships to send gifted students to boarding schools.

AIEF’s indefatigable chief executive Andrew Penfold has received more than $30m in commonwealth funds, and much more from private sources; he has won appointment to Abbott’s Indigenous Advisory Council; he has close links to this newspaper, which reports regularly on the achievements of his students — indeed AIEF is the official charity sponsor of The Australian’s 50th anniversary festivities. Its programs fill a niche and have obvious merit, but it is a harvester of easy, low-hanging fruit, a picker of winners in the Aboriginal education sector — it supports students who excel, not those who struggle; students from urban and regional rather than remote community backgrounds. Donors and bureaucrats like success stories: as a result, AIEF has proved supreme in the battle for the Prime Minister’s ear and heart and mind.

What, though, of DI, the program Abbott praised to the skies on his high-profile visit to the CYAAA campus at Aur­ukun, the program he promised $22m in such fulsome terms that Pearson’s Cape York Partnerships organisation drew up plans for a national DI institute to oversee its launch across the bush? Nine months after the Coalition election victory, DI had fallen off the agenda. Then a private lunchtime meeting took place in Canberra between the Prime Minister and an extremely senior figure in the national media. What had happened to DI, Abbott was asked point-blank, and, nonplussed, he stared away into the distance — it is one of his more endearing traits — before proffering his reply: a reply that said a great deal in a few words about policymaking in today’s Australia. One of his best-known and most prominent advisers had taken a look at DI and its track record, he explained, and decided that it was full of holes.

As it happens, DI has also been reviewed by other authorities during the past 50 years of its use in other countries; indeed, it is the most studied tuition method in the history of Western education. Hundreds of research initiatives have reviewed the results of more than 200 million DI pupils. One of the most comprehensive overviews of the field, released four years ago by John Hattie of the University of Melbourne’s Education Research Institute, found that DI advanced the learning of students 1½ times faster than an average intervention. A famous American analysis of teaching systems, Project Follow-Through, the largest longitudinal education experiment conducted, looked at the results of various tuition methods in more than 50 school districts across a decade. DI achieved the best results in maths, spelling and language, and was the only approach found to improve high-order skills; it was also the program with the most positive effect on the basic skills of students.

The prime ministerial lunch drew on, the conversation swirled away, Abbott went back to work — and three days later, by one of those extraordinary coincidences that make life in Canberra so invigorating, a large advertisement appeared in the national media, together with a fulsome interview in this newspaper from Scullion advertising the ad. DI was back in favour: the federal government was asking for tenders to run a project worth $22m over 3½ years for the delivery of DI or similar programs in the bush: Pearson’s CYAAA group would have the option to submit its proposals. The tender was open to bids for just more than a week.

DI, then, is likely to have its day at last in regions beyond Cape York. Indeed, this seems a racing certainty, given the collapse of educational performance in remote indigenous Australia. The failure of the present remote community schooling system is most acute in the Northern Territory, which has repeatedly reviewed its disastrous education department in recent years. The latest, and sharpest, of those reviews concluded bluntly that indigenous secondary education in the remote NT had failed, and that the secondary school campuses opened across the bush by Labor during its decade in power should be phased out and replaced with city boarding facilities.

The state of primary level education was assessed as almost equally dire, and various remedies canvassed. A phase change was needed; there was one clear option. The NT is now on the verge of transferring 20 of its most challenging bush primary schools, in the centre and Arnhem Land, to DI instruction, overseen by trained teachers from the academy campuses of the Cape. It promises to be a transformative expansion for DI, a new paradigm for bush schools, but it raises a raft of questions. Can the CYAAA model be transferred without the associated economic and family management programs set up to support it in Aurukun, Coen and Hope Vale? Will the NT schools run the CYAAA’s extended teaching day, or its elaborate, locally tailored “club and culture” programs, or its case management of attendance? The NT Education Department stands ready, and the NT government, which usually prefers to starve the bush of funds, has put up $4.5m of its own money.

Today it was revealed in The Weekend Australian that in September the Prime Minister for indigenous affairs will fulfil his promise to spend a week in an Abor­iginal community on the anni­versary of his first year in office, although he will be unable to make a return this Aug­ust to the Garma Festival of Yolngu culture in the Top End, the backdrop he used to highlight his indigenous policies in the 2013 campaign — but he has at last made moves to fulfil his most deliberately given and personal pledge.

All this, though, is far beyond the focused world of the children at the Hope Vale academy school. The classroom bells ring once more: 2.45 in the afternoon, time for the specially extended “club and culture” teaching sessions, as the sun sinks in the grey sky, and the long last lessons of the day unfold: musical ensemble practice, art tutorials, planetary science — experiences that lead to wide horizons. The mood in each student circle is calm, engaged, exploratory, there is a low hum of talk, explaining, interchange: normal schooling, in a bush classroom, a dream of harmonious learning brought to life.