Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Labor is supporting the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2006 because it provides for additional funding for Indigenous education. In total there will be an extra $43.6 million over the 2006 to 2008 quadrennium. Specifically, that funding will be broken up in the following way. There will be an amount to extend tutorial assistance to students in year 9. Similarly, there will be tutorial assistance available for students in vocational education and TAFE. There is money for community festivals, money for activities that promote health and anti substance abuse and funding for school based sporting academies and related activities for Indigenous students. From that list it is obvious that Labor has no problem with what is in this bill. Rather, our problem is with what is not in the bill. There is nothing in it to indicate that the government has learned anything from the mess it has made of funding for Indigenous education over the past couple of years.

For those who take an interest in the state of Indigenous education, there is a much more accurate reflection of what is going on to be found in the second reading amendment moved by Labor’s shadow minister. Labor’s amendment reflects the urgency of the task facing governments around the country when it comes to addressing the gap in educational outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

It is all there in the second reading amendment. It condemns the government for failing to deliver urgently needed funding for Indigenous students by insisting on complex and bureaucratic administrative arrangements that prevent many schools and communities from benefiting from educational programs. We have heard from other speakers already about the $126 million underspend in the Indigenous Education Strategic Initiatives Program. We have heard criticism already, and it is in the second reading amendment, of the impenetrable red tape that has been introduced to many of the programs now making up the Indigenous education funding from the Commonwealth government. This red tape has led to a decline in the involvement of Indigenous communities in the Parent School Partnership Initiative.

The government has failed to provide sufficient resources for early intervention programs in schools to raise Indigenous children’s literacy standards. It has reduced the number of Indigenous schoolchildren who access tutorial assistance by making eligibility requirements more restrictive and short term. Finally, the amendment condemns the government for presiding for 10 long years over continuing gaps in educational and training participation and performance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. It is without doubt a comprehensive second reading amendment and it is also a comprehensive indictment of the government’s failure on Indigenous students in this country. You do not have to look very far for statistics to back up that failure. The most recent statistics benchmarking Indigenous students’ performance in writing, reading and numeracy against that of non-Indigenous students show a very significant gap of up to 20 or more percentage points between the average performance of Indigenous students and that of their non-Indigenous counterparts.

As we have heard from other speakers already in this debate, the government’s policy for improving the outcomes for Indigenous education is in absolute disarray. In the past couple of years radical changes have been made to longstanding programs and practices in this area. You might say there is nothing wrong with radical change, especially when faced with the shocking statistics on Indigenous education that I have just referred to. The problem is that there does not seem to have been any clear rationale for the changes and there has been almost no effective consultation with educators and members of the Indigenous community in arriving at these changes.

I will go through the changes one at a time, and first are the changes to the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme. Previously, schools received funding to provide tutorial assistance to Indigenous students based on the school’s assessment of who needed the extra help. Students who had been identified by their teachers as needing extra assistance were eligible for up to five hours of tuition per week, either as individuals or as part of small groups. For the most part, the tuition was provided outside the classroom. One of the changes to the tuition program is the shift to using in-class tutors to provide supplementary assistance to students for up to 2½ hours per week, but what has really changed the nature of the tuition program is the way in which eligibility for assistance is determined. Funding is now provided to schools based on the numbers of Indigenous students who fail the years 3, 5 and 7 benchmark tests for literacy and numeracy.

You have to ask where on earth DEST came up with that idea. It was certainly not from anyone with educational experience. The evidence at the recent Senate committee inquiry into these changes was overwhelming in its criticism of DEST’s failure based approach to funding for tuition. The report referred to the submissions on ITAS as highlighting ‘the disjuncture of funding policy and educational practice’. Reading through the evidence, I really felt for the principals and teachers. They are desperately trying to make sense of a program that is contrary to everything they know from educational theory and their own experience to be effective in assisting Indigenous kids with literacy and numeracy.

Thankfully, the government has made one small concession that will give schools some chance to use the tuition money according to their own assessment of what works for their students. Following the debate on the original Indigenous education bill back in 2004, when Labor vehemently opposed the proposed changes to ITAS, the minister did allow some flexibility in the way the money can be used. Schools can now determine for themselves which students will receive the tutorial assistance and when it is provided to those students, but the amount is still based on the number of students who fail the tests. As I said, though, there is flexibility in how it is utilised across the school to best meet the needs of the students. But that is a minor improvement to a system which still completely flies in the face of the early intervention approach that educators will tell you is the key to building strong foundations and achieving good educational outcomes.

In contrast to the weight of evidence in favour of early intervention strategies, the recent Senate report states that DEST was ‘unable to cite any assessment of the educational validity of the failure based approach to funding’. Common sense tells you that that is because there is not any. Submission after submission to the Senate inquiry made that point. For example, the Catholic Education Office in Darwin described the funding model as ‘pedagogically unsound’. The Association of Independent Schools of South Australia questioned the design of ITAS that focuses support for students on post-benchmark failure. Intervention at that point is inappropriate, as early intervention is the key to educational success for students at risk of failure. Why should Indigenous kids have to struggle and fail in year 3 and be even more alienated from the education system before they are eligible for help from the federal government?

The surprising thing is that the minister for education obviously knows the importance of early intervention strategies and their success in improving the educational outcomes of students experiencing difficulties with literacy and numeracy. I say that because we have just celebrated National Literacy and Numeracy Week. Schools around Australia were recognised by the minister for their achievements in improving literacy and numeracy for their students. I cannot imagine that any of the recipients won for offering programs that do not address students’ problems until after they have failed in year 3. I know one school that certainly would not advocate that approach. I am talking about Blackwater North State School, in my electorate, which was awarded a highly commended award for their program Leap into Learning, which has achieved outstanding results for students in the early primary school years. The program was initially aimed at year 2 students, but elements of the program are now incorporated in preschool and year 1 lessons as well as year 2.

I raise the example of Blackwater North for two reasons. One, of course, is to congratulate the school and its staff on their commitment to providing quality education, which has been recognised with this national award. I also raise it to underline the point that I have made about early intervention. Here was a school that identified problems at the year 2 level, but what was their response? Their response was not to wait until the students failed a year 3 test and then give them assistance in year 4, but quite the opposite. The school’s application for the literacy week award said:

Leap into Learning outlines a commitment to the early years as they are critical to children’s ongoing learning and development because they set firm foundations for learning and progression through school which is reflected in this project.

The example of Blackwater North State School is just one example of what we saw time and again before the Senate inquiry. Teachers know their students and are in the best position to assess how best to meet their needs and improve their learning outcomes. They want to give students that help as and when they need it, not according to the convenience and the dictates of the department of education.

I will now talk about the other major change, which was to the ASSPA program. It was not a change but a complete abolition of the Aboriginal Student Support and Parent Awareness program. This has been replaced by the new Parent School Partnership Initiative program, but the transition between the two programs has been a disaster. It is not even a question of the merits of the PSPI program; it is just that the transition has meant that nothing can truly succeed with what has been left behind. The sad thing is that it was a disaster that was entirely foreseen. Labor did not support the abolition of ASSPA but, once it was clear that the government would persist with that policy, we wanted to make sure that the transition to the PSPI program was done properly, without completely destroying the relationships that had been established between schools and Indigenous parents under the ASSPA program.

At the time we were debating the amendment bill at the end of 2004, Labor members were begging the government to use 2005 as a transition year to allow for time for the changes to be properly implemented. That included time for DEST to figure out what it was doing and to disseminate information to its staff in regional offices around Australia and time to explain the changes to school communities so that they were not completely ambushed by the loss of their ASSPA funding. Of course, none of that happened, and the reaction from schools and Indigenous parents that Labor members predicted and warned the government about has occurred, with the end result being a huge loss of faith in the process and many Indigenous parents just walking away from involvement in their kids’ schools.

Again, just like the changes to ITAS, there is no real policy rationale underlying the change to ASSPA. The government points to a review of the program conducted by DEST in 2002 and 2003 but the report from that review is quite inconclusive, and even reasonably supportive of ASSPA. No-one reading that report would say that it advocates or provides the basis for the wholesale scrapping of the ASSPA program but, nonetheless, that debate took place and the bill was passed at the end of 2004. For most schools it was only when the school year started in 2005 that they realised that they would no longer receive the ASSPA money that had supported many activities for their Indigenous students. Instead of receiving the automatic funding based on the number of Indigenous students enrolled, schools were to learn that they now had to go through a two-step application process to compete for funding which they may or may not receive.

The whole idea of ASSPA to start with was to have reliable and predictable funding to support Indigenous students to take up opportunities that they might otherwise miss out on. It was also there for the school to run activities like nutrition programs and events such as NAIDOC Week—the kinds of activities that would make Indigenous students and their parents feel that they are a valued part of the school community. ASSPA committees had proved to be an effective way of encouraging Indigenous parents to become involved in schools and in school decision making. It was the parent committee’s job to work with the principal and other school staff to come up with the plan for using ASSPA funds.

For good reason, the story of what happened in 2005 was the subject of the Senate committee’s inquiry. The committee heard from schools in Indigenous communities around Australia, and the experiences related to the committee matched the warnings given by Labor in 2004. Important school activities that for years had been funded by ASSPA were not possible in 2005 for most of the schools that appeared before the committee. These activities were mainly extracurricular but they had significant linkages to educational outcomes that were recognised by the people who should know—the principals and teachers who had worked with ASSPA committees to incorporate the activities into the schools’ programs.

There is a recognition by teachers that the issues relating to Indigenous education are broad and often go beyond what happens inside the classroom, so there has to be a lateral approach taken to solving problems like behaviour management and academic progress. ASSPA funding was often the answer to some of those creative solutions. I note that, ironically, the kinds of programs that this bill is now funding follow the same rationale as that for the ASSPA funding—the recognition that the issues affecting Indigenous students go far beyond what happens when they walk into the classroom.

Some other examples that were funded out of ASSPA funding were things like nutrition programs, which came up frequently before the Senate inquiry. Teachers fronting classrooms know that you cannot teach kids who are hungry, so running a breakfast club or similar activity is part of achieving educational outcomes at schools where they know kids are attending classes without receiving adequate nutrition at home. It was a similar story with sporting activities. At many schools ASSPA money paid for Indigenous kids to take part in sport, whether it was money for travel or for equipment. Again, this was recognised by teachers and the community as giving the students a positive experience of school and helped back in the classroom when it came to their academic results.

With the demise of ASSPA, the money that funded those types of activities is gone. But, worse than that, the way that ASSPA was abolished and replaced by the PSPI program has been a big setback in trying to get Indigenous parents involved in schools. Where once parents were invited to work with the school to plan for the use of ASSPA money, now there is no money until someone at the school goes through a two-step application process to access Parent School Partnership Initiative funds. Not surprisingly, there has been a big backlash by schools against the process. DEST have finally, it appears, started listening to those directly involved in helping and educating Indigenous kids and I believe that they have folded the two steps into a single application.

But it is very hard not to think that the damage has already been done. The message has been sent, by the way DEST handled the whole process, that Indigenous parents are not important and that they cannot really be trusted to make decisions for their kids. The government did not consult with the Indigenous community about abolishing ASSPA and did not explain how they could be part of the new scheme. The PSPI program is overly bureaucratic and so badly designed that you could not come up with something more alienating and off-putting for Indigenous parents if you tried.

That was certainly echoed by one of the schools that I spoke to in my electorate. I tried to get a bit of feedback from around the place. One large primary school in Rockhampton related their experience. They put in two applications under PSPI—one last year and one again in 2006. Both have been rejected. The application both times was to employ a teacher aide to support learning amongst Indigenous students. The deputy principal, whom I spoke to, told me that the process for applying is quite onerous, with excessive paperwork, lots of supportive documentation and many hours of work. Of course, it was very frustrating for the school staff and the Indigenous parents whose kids were relying on that assistance when those applications that have been worked on over many hours were rejected.

The deputy principal said that she is quite hesitant to apply for PSPI again after the fruitless effort they went to with the previous two applications. The deputy principal said that they used the ASSPA funding, which now of course is not available to the school, for Indigenous kids to go on excursions and to take part in sporting activities and that she knows for a fact that the kids are worse off for the loss of that money. This school also had an experience of losing funding under the ITAS program. They said that they employed a full-time staff member to assist Indigenous kids previously but the changes to ITAS have forced that staff member to be made part time, and there is subsequently less time to give to those kids to improve their educational outcomes.

Another school I want to mention is Crescent Lagoon State School. This school has quite a large proportion of Indigenous kids and they recently held a very successful set of NAIDOC Week activities. They lost their ASSPA funding, of course—they no longer have their ASSPA committee—but the Indigenous parents and a teacher, Amanda Power, got together to make sure that their kids would not miss out. They were not going to let the lack of federal government funding get in the way of them having a fantastic NAIDOC Week. They wrote to businesses around Rockhampton to get together money so that they could set up the activities. They got an awful lot of support from throughout the community.

One of the highlights of the NAIDOC Week activities was a special assembly I attended where an ‘adopt an elder’ program was put in place. They have adopted Mrs Nyoka Hatfield. Her name is Gami, which is Aboriginal for grandmother. Mrs Hatfield has had a long involvement with the school and this formalised what she has contributed over the years in teaching these kids at Crescent Lagoon about the Indigenous history of our local area and Indigenous culture.

In conclusion, I support the second reading amendment which condemns the government and calls on it to reform its funding criteria and guidelines so as to address the problems and provide all Indigenous students with the opportunity to achieve quality schooling results.

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