ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Traditional owners, the Turrbal people
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh
Professor Mick Dodson, 2009 Australian of the Year (via video link)
Mr Tom Calma, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner
Dr Chris Sarra, Executive Director Indigenous Education Leadership Institute
INTRODUCTION
It’s a pleasure to be here today to open the Stronger Smarter Summit. Chris, thank you for your national leadership in bringing this Summit together.
I’m not going to rattle off all the well known statistics that show how we are letting Indigenous kids down by failing to give them a world class education.
Today is not a day to continue wringing our hands.
Today is not a day to shirk responsibilities and wonder who is at fault.
If Indigenous kids in this nation aren’t getting a fair go that’s our fault, the fault of the adults in this nation whose job it is to make sure they do - it’s the fault of the governments, the bureaucrats, the local communities, the schools, the teachers and the parents who let these kids down.
And today is not a day to seek comfort in old negative mindsets.
Today as we commence this Summit, we should be guided by the words of three leaders.
First President George Bush who said to the 2004 Republican Convention:
“In northeast Georgia, Gainesville Elementary School is mostly Hispanic and 90 per cent poor. And this year, 90 per cent of its students passed tests in reading and maths. The Principal expresses the philosophy of his school this way, ‘We don’t focus on what we can’t do at this school, we focus on what we can do. And we do whatever it takes to get kids across the finish line.’ See this Principal is challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Second, let’s be guided by the words of President Barack Obama who challenged his nation and the world with the simple but powerful phrase ‘yes we can’.
And third, let’s be challenged by the words of another important leader - our Chris Sarra - who seeks to inspire us everyday with the words ‘we can do this’ - we can as a nation ensure that Indigenous kids get a world class education.
Today, at this Summit let’s say to ourselves and each other that we won’t succumb to the belief that it’s too hard, that there is some inevitability about Indigenous kids being at the back of the class.
We will reject the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’.
We will set high expectations for the achievement of Indigenous children.
We can do this, we will do this.
Today’s Summit is a call to action and I want to open by providing my answers to three questions:
What do we know works to lift the educational achievement of Indigenous kids?
What new tools for change are in our hands as a result of the transformative reforms underway in school education?
How should we combine what works with those new tools for change?
WHAT WORKS
First, what works.
In the desert of Central Australia at Ntaria School in Hermannsburg strong school leaders, community engagement and a culture of high expectations have helped deliver outstanding improvements in student enrolment and attendance.
Principal Darrell Fowler is committed and energetic. He has built high expectations at every level and leveraged the opportunities provided by working with the new education agenda, including the attendance and enrolment welfare trial, the delivery of new school infrastructure and a new preschool block funded through the Building the Education Revolution.
In the last year, there has been an increase in enrolments of nearly 30 per cent and attendance rates have increased by 8.4 per cent to an average of 77 per cent.
Better engagement and attendance is having a flow on effect to literacy and numeracy, with significant improvements in student achievement in national testing (NAPLAN). Participation has increased from 40 per cent in 2008 to 94 per cent in 2009 with outstanding improvements in student achievement, including a number of students above national minimum standard compared with none at this level in 2008.
At the other end of the territory on Elcho Island, a few hundred kilometres east of Darwin at Shepherdson College, a remote school with over 600 students, a quiet revolution is taking place.
With quality leadership from a passionate principal the school and community are forging new partnerships. There has been an increase in enrolment of over 25 per cent in the last year. The school is now a place where parents and the community feel welcome and are encouraged to participate.
This is largely the result of Bryan Hughes, a committed principal who has developed a leadership team of senior teachers who share his passion for quality education and his vision for the future of a school at the heart of the community.
Importantly, he has made a public commitment to stay for the ‘long haul’ - which he talks about as five to eight years. This has allowed him to build trust and a new partnership with community elders.
Some of the reforms he has introduced include the part-time employment of a group of community elders to mentor the principal and school leadership team as they continue to strengthen the partnership between school and community. He has improved engagement of middle years students through the introduction of VET programs. In-class coaching and mentoring of teachers and assistant teachers continues to lead to improvements in teaching and learning, particularly for Indigenous educators undertaking further formal training.
Of 55 teaching staff at the school at the beginning of 2008, 43 are still there at the start of 2009.
There are already signs that the changes are already making a difference with participation up from 60 per cent in 2008 to 71 per cent in 2009 and improvements starting to show in student achievement particularly in Year 3 writing and Year 5 numeracy.
These examples and Chris’ own experience at Cherbourg have a lot in common.
They share most or all of the five key elements that we know make a difference in improving outcomes for Indigenous students:
- Students are ready to learn
- Attendance at school
- Quality Teachers and Inspirational School Leadership
- A Focus on Literacy and Numeracy
- Parental and Community Engagement.
And all of these are, of course, underpinned by a high expectations agenda that says ‘we can do this’ and ‘we reject the soft bigotry of low expectations’, of believing that Indigenous students can’t succeed at school.
THE NEW TOOLS - THE SCHOOL REFORM AGENDA
Having talked about what works, let’s talk about the new tools for change our school reform agenda is generating.
As a Government, we are engaging in a widespread reform agenda across school education based on the central belief that tolerating underachievement, especially among those who come from disadvantaged circumstances, is unacceptable.
We have almost doubled our investment in school education over the next four years.
All governments across this country have agreed to meet Closing the Gap targets to improve the literacy and numeracy outcomes for Indigenous students, to improve school retention and to increase the numbers of Indigenous kids receiving early childhood education.
Today I want to describe to you how our school reform agenda is giving us new ways, new tools to make a difference in the five areas that we know are so powerful in improving the educational achievement of Indigenous children.
Students are ready to learn
Evidence tells us that children learn the most in the first eight years of their life and that the earlier children are engaged in learning, the more successful they are likely to be in school and later life. This is now beyond debate.
Attending playgroup and preschool programs can help children to learn how to learn and to develop important socialisation skills. Without doubt, participating in these programs really does give kids a head start at school.
To give children particularly Indigenous children that head start we are building new Children and Family Centres that will deliver early learning, child care and family support programs all in the one location. These centres will begin to instil a love of learning in Indigenous kids and establish vital and positive connections between education and the community.
The Australian Early Development Index is being implemented nationally to support children in the years before school and ensure they are healthy and ready to learn with an Indigenous AEDI being developed to ensure the program is culturally inclusive and relevant to the needs of Indigenous children.
Attendance at school
Second, we are striving to make a difference to attendance at school.
Now, I am acutely aware of the debate raging around the best way to get students to attend school, but I think we can all agree that doing nothing is not an option.
We can make all the investments and have all the right programs and teachers in place but we will achieve nothing unless students are coming to school and actually going to class every day.
The Rudd Government has decided to trial an approach to school attendance and enrolment based on the quarantining of welfare.
Trials of welfare quarantining are under way in a number of communities across the Northern Territory and will begin here in Queensland following an announcement by Premier Bligh and Minister Macklin just a few weeks ago.
I know that there are many people in this room and outside of it who believe that this is not the best way to get kids to school.
That’s a legitimate debate but we have an obligation after years of failure to try every possible approach.
We are also looking at other approaches, encouraging states and territories to use the funding provided under our $1.5 billion National Partnership for Low SES School Communities to develop attendance strategies based around community engagement.
We will follow the outcomes of the welfare quarantining trials closely and we will evaluate the effectiveness of other programs implemented under our national partnerships to see what works and spread that best practice.
I am not ideological about the method of getting kids to school, I am only ideological about the outcome.
Quality Teachers and Inspirational School Leadership
Third, we are reforming the way we think about and develop quality teaching and school leadership through a $550 million new national partnership.
Transformational change can only occur at a school level when the leadership is absolutely committed to driving it.
We are implementing a number of ambitious initiatives to ensure we offer Australian students the highest quality teachers, both at school and during their early childhood education.
Programs like Teach for Australia will see high performing graduates receive intensive training and be placed in disadvantaged schools with experienced teachers as mentors to try and make a difference.
We’re going to be paying our best teachers more and putting them in the classrooms where they are needed the most.
We must better prepare teachers and we must support them in their important task of teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and reduce the destructive effect of high teacher turnover. For example, if school systems are sending teachers out to remote Indigenous communities, they must ensure these teachers are prepared for community life and that they have strong skills in teaching English as a second language.
A recent study undertaken by Monash University surveyed around 4,500 Australian teachers about their professional learning. More than a quarter of those surveyed said that the area in which they wanted more professional development was in being able to better assist Indigenous students.
It is vital that teachers, no matter where they teach, have the competence to appreciate and teach children from other cultures. I am listening to teachers and I will be seeking more commitment from universities and education systems to make sure teachers are better prepared to work successfully with Indigenous students.
A Focus on Literacy and Numeracy
Fourth, we are driving change with a focus on literacy and numeracy.
One of the key planks of improving Indigenous education outcomes is building skills in literacy and numeracy. Here, as elsewhere, quality teaching is highly important, as is a sustained and consistent approach to how literacy and numeracy is taught.
Literacy and Numeracy are the keys to further education and employment.
Investing in the basics for young Indigenous Australians is one of the most important and effective things that we can do to ensure that they can reach their full potential. The evidence clearly shows just how important these fundamentals are to improved life opportunities.
We are investing $540 million in a National Partnership to lift literacy and numeracy skills across Australia and a further $56 million to expand intensive literacy and numeracy programs specifically for Indigenous students.
Together with Literacy and Numeracy Pilots in disadvantaged areas, we are getting more information on which approaches are successful and how these approaches might be expanded elsewhere.
We know that there is success out there - for example, in four out of the five test categories under the 2008 National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), more than 20 per cent of Indigenous children in Victorian Year 3 classes ranked in the highest two bands of achievement. We need to identify schools that are demonstrating success so that we can learn how to do things smarter in the future.
Parental and Community Engagement
Fifth, experience tells us that reforms in school will only ever have limited success if we do not engage and involve families and communities around the reform agenda.
This is why we have tried to ensure our national reform agenda is based on teachers and school leaders reaching out to their communities and working together in a spirit of high expectations to bring about change.
To support these types of partnerships, we are investing more than $20 million each year through our Parental and Community Engagement program, to support projects where Indigenous families are taking the initiative to do something innovative and special to assist their children to achieve those high expectations for the future.
For true partnerships to succeed, we need communities that are ready and able to engage with schools. Where communities develop ideas to assist their children’s learning, we must listen and where we can, support them. We must recognise that local needs and ownership of reforms are central to our goals, and that Closing the Gap must be a shared project between all of us.
AN INDIGENOUS EDUCATION ACTION PLAN
As governments we should not and cannot seek to prescribe all the actions of every individual teacher. As the Australian Government we are not seeking to direct the action of every single education system. But governments should accept a shared accountability for making this work.
We all have to direct our energies and the efforts of existing systems, teachers, principals and communities to this task.
This means supporting every school to put in place its own strategy to ensure that its Indigenous students are getting effective support to learn.
It means combining what works to lift educational achievement for Indigenous children with our new reform agenda and new tools for change.
Since becoming Education Minister in 2007, I have unapologetically pursued a transparency agenda.
Much of the debate about transparency has centred on so-called league tables. For me, transparency has always been about information for parents, accountability of governments and schools and being able to target additional resources to schools that need it most.
In January next year school performance information for every school in the country will be published on a national website. This is a vitally important and powerful tool for change.
I am confident that reporting will identify a number of schools with high proportions of Indigenous students who have performed very well. We will find more of the sorts of schools I have talked about today, schools that are modelling to us what works. We need to capture what it is these schools are doing and share this best practice.
It is also likely that there will be a large number of schools with high proportions of Indigenous students who are not performing well.
It will be completely transparent which schools need to improve their outcomes to deliver for Indigenous students and need help.
The transparency agenda comes with significant new resources, with billions of dollars being made available for those things that we know make a difference in National Partnerships between the Commonwealth and the States and Territories.
We are investing $1.5 billion to support low SES school communities, $550 million to support quality teaching, $540 million to support literacy and numeracy and $970 million to support universal preschool.
This year, States and Territories also took on responsibility for the expenditure of targeted Indigenous education funding through the new structure of federal financial relations. States and Territories argued that they as responsible education authorities were better able to direct Indigenous education resources to where they were most needed and would be most effective. These resources previously quarantined by the Commonwealth have been provided to States and Territories as part of the $42 billion National Education Agreement.
Through our school reform agenda we have both the mechanism to identify those schools that are not delivering for our Indigenous young people and the resources to fix it.
Later this morning at a meeting of Education Ministers I will be putting forward a new Indigenous Education Action Plan.
I will be asking Education Ministers to agree that those schools that are identified as not performing through our new transparency measures will have the full force and resources of the National Partnerships and National Education Agreement directed them to drive improvement.
They will be required to develop school level strategies and take action in the four areas of attendance at school, quality teaching and school leadership, literacy and numeracy and parental and community engagement. In addition, States will be asked to direct resources through our National Partnership on universal preschool to helping the young children who will go to those schools to be ready to learn.
To help build this new approach and the outcomes of this Summit, I am pleased to announce today that the Australian Government has committed $16.4 million to the Stronger Smarter Learning Communities project.
The project, to be led by Chris Sara, will help ensure that school leaders across Australia are supported and challenged in ways that will help them turn outcomes around for Indigenous students.
I can also announce that the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute at the Queensland University of Technology will also be renamed the Stronger Smarter Institute reflecting the importance of the Stronger Smarter philosophy in delivering transformational change in Indigenous education.
I will also be asking Chris Sarra to bring the resources of the new Stronger Smarter Learning Communities network to bear on the task of driving improvement in schools which are shown by our new transparency measures to be in need of help.
Chris has already begun establishing a network of outstanding school leaders who get results in Indigenous education. This network aims to support and disseminate best practice on Indigenous education.
This network has the capacity to complement the work of government in assisting those schools we identify as needing assistance to meet the needs of their Indigenous students. Principals at these schools will be able to participate in the Stronger Smarter Learning Communities program so they get the support and professional development they need to take back and implement transformational change in their schools.
CONCLUSION
Let me conclude by saying this Summit is a call to action, a time and a place to say we can close the gap, we will close the gap. We can aim high and lift standards for Indigenous children and we will.
Here at the Stronger Smarter conference you as educators need to continue to share best practice and support your colleagues to deliver on what works in the classroom.
At the Ministerial Council later today, I will be asking all governments to back in your efforts at your schools with the support you need to genuinely make a difference.
Today, I have outlined a way of bringing what we know works to the schools that need help with leadership giving by remarkable Indigenous educators like Chris Sarra.
I know change will require hard work, determination and the fortitude to keep pushing forward.
Having identified schools that need change and improvement, we will do everything we can with our new resources and stronger, smarter ways of working to drive that improvement over the next 12 months and then monitor, evaluate and push forward again.
Setbacks and stresses will be par for the course.
But I am determined - and I am confident that you share this determination - to get this done.
Chris, friends, we can do this.
Let’s get to work.