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NT Deputy Chief rejects education apartheid claims
Issue 151 - 17 Apr 2008
By Tara Ravens
DARWIN
Issue 151, April 17, 2008: Claims that Aboriginal students in the Northern Territory are being failed by an apartheid education system are “insulting and offensive”, Australia’s most senior Indigenous politician says.
In a damning report by the Australian National University’s Centre for Independent Studies, Professor Helen Hughes says thousands of Aboriginal students are finishing school with the numeracy and literacy skills of five-year-olds.
This condemns them to a life of welfare dependency because they lack “the basic skills to get an unskilled job”, she says.
Prof Hughes, a senior fellow at the centre, said homeland schools in remote communities worked off a “second-rate” curriculum and lacked teaching material.
Qualified teachers were only flown in for a few hours a week and students often finished their studies unable to speak English.
“Indigenous children are being denied primary education” Ms Hughes told ABC Radio.
“It’s the apartheid education that is failing these children and creating horrendous problems for the Northern Territory.”
Last December, Prof Hughes took into her care two teenaged girls from a remote Aboriginal community.
When the pair - both aged 16 - arrived in Sydney for a 10-week intensive study course, Prof Hughes said, they were unable to read or write.
“Their spelling, their reading and their arithmetic were grade one, but these girls had attended the school whenever it was open for respectively nine and 10 years,” she said.
“They had been going to school but they emerged being unable to read or write or do simple arithmetic.”
Prof Hughes said another 20 teenagers in the community could not read the signs on a normal Darwin street.
“There are about 10,000 of these illiterate non-numerate teenagers who have been going to school ... What is the government of the NT going to do about these 10,000 children?” she asked.
But NT Deputy Chief Minister Marion Scrymgour has dismissed her findings and says the claims are “absolutely insulting and offensive”.
“I just find it astounding that she bases a report and a generalisation across the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities based on one small homeland centre that she has visited,” she said.
Ms Scrymgour said Prof Hughes had left out “some fundamental pieces of information” and denied the government was providing misleading figures on education standards in the bush.
Nadine Williams, NT president of the Australian Education Union, said Prof Hughes needed to “stop generalising”.
“It would be helpful if Helen Hughes had ever been to some of the places she’s talking about,” she said.
NT Opposition Leader Terry Mills has called for an independent audit of all territory schools to investigate the claims that some students only have teachers for a few hours a week.
“These are serious allegations,” he said.
“It is every student’s right to sit in class with a fully qualified teacher.” - AAP
 
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