Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator McMahon for her question and for her strong representation of the Northern Territory. The Liberal and Nationals government knows that further effort is required to improve educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in regional and remote Australia. Indigenous kids, particularly those from remote areas, are more likely to start school behind, with the gap growing throughout their schooling life, and, if you start behind, it's incredibly hard to catch up. School attendance rates have not improved, and, despite some improvements in literacy and numeracy, about one in four Indigenous students in years 5, 7 and 9 remain below the national minimum standards in reading. We want to turn that around.

Since the national agreement was signed, the Commonwealth has taken concrete, practical steps to establish partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to develop solutions that work and enable shared decision-making processes.

Everything we do under that agreement is in partnership not just with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders but with states and territories. As announced by the PM today, we're investing $250 million to ensure all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children have a strong and positive start to their learning journey to be able to access quality education that will assist closing the gap, with significant investment in evidence based programs, a lift in participation and improving literacy rates, and $280 million to support improvements in leadership capability, professional development and student outcomes through city-to-country partnerships, getting high-performing metro schools partnering with Indigenous schools. Haileybury, in my home state, is partnering with an Indigenous school in Darwin, and they're getting great improvements. You can't be what you can't see. Often, for young people, it's learning from their peers. We've seen a significant improvement in NAPLAN results as a result of that partnership. We're also investing in— (Time expired)