Strong Futures in the NT - A New Approach or Just a New Name?

On the 23 November 2011 the Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin introduced a package of bills to federal parliament on the replacement to the NT Emergency Response. The new measures go by the title " Stronger Futures in the NT but many critics argue that it is basically the same approach rebadged.

It upholds many of the controversial aspects of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), and moves education from a minor NTER element to a major priority.  Accordingly the new program will roll out the School Enrolment and Attendance Measure (SEAM) across the NT.

Note: According to the FAHCSIA website the improving School Enrolment and Attendance through Welfare Reform Measure (SEAM) is an Australian Government measure to trial the attachment of conditions to income support and family assistance payments.  Its aim is to encourage parents (or those with responsibility for a child) to ensure that their children of compulsory school age are enrolled in and attending school regularly.

If parents cannot demonstrate that they are taking reasonable steps in enrolling their children or ensuring their children attend school, they may have their income support payments temporarily suspended until action is taken.

The SEAM trial evaluations have yet to be made public but an evaluation of the Halls Creek Engaging Families trial where payments were tied to school attendance showed that there had been no increase in school attendance as a result of the trial.

This announcement follows a six-week period of consultations across NTER communities over the Stronger Futures discussion paper. According to Macklin, these consultations confirm that Aboriginal communities believe more needs to be done to achieve change and that there is broad support for linking welfare payments to schools attendance and for income management.

The decision, and the consultations themselves, have both been widely criticized.

Amnesty International reported that it was concerned that the new approach is not different in key ways from the previous approach that was rolled out without any consultation and left many Aboriginal people traumatized.

There are also concerns over the decision to expand SEAM.

Amnesty International argues that there is no evidence to suggest that threatening to withdraw income support creates behavioural change in children's attendance at school.

They are also concerned that nothing is being done about the situation in homelands where many children live with no access to a real school or real teachers and the NT government has made it clear that all investment in Homelands will cease.

Nicholas Rothwell (The Intervention: A Reckoning after Four Years, The Australian, 26 November 2011) has a different take on this announcement.  He sees, in the roll out of the SEAM process, the heavy hand of Noel Pearson but notes that the model imposed is radically different from the Cape York approach.

With this bizarre campaign at last wound up, the focus shifts in earnest to social engineering. A federal scheme to stop truancy in community schools by raising the threat of cutting family welfare payments will be expanded across the Top End. Here is Pearson's shadow, but where the Cape York reform project works through local involvement, through a Family Responsibilities Commission, the new Territory plan brings Centrelink on to the stage.

In Cape York, it is community figures who hold hearings and consult with parents: under the Territory blueprint, outside bureaucrats will meet problem families and draw up school attendance plans. If their children fail to respond, their welfare payments, as a last measure, will be cut.

Given that the Northern Territory's own spasmodically applied new education laws aim at fining delinquent families, the two schemes pull in different directions - but both recognise, and acknowledge, a pattern of disaster. At one large coastal community in northeast Arnhem Land, every minister's favourite backdrop for photo opportunities and speechifying, a mere 16 per cent of children go to school.

To read this article, go to http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/the-intervention-a-reckoning-after-four-years/story-fn59niix-1226206442938

One of the strongest criticism of the Seam expansion comes from CAEPR's John Altman (The cunning of consultation: school attendance and welfare reform,  Crikey, 2 December 2011)

And so the soft targets of school attendance; ... have been selected for an escalated and additional layer of punitive measures....

The Improving School Enrolment and Attendance (through Welfare Reform) Measure or SEAM (with the bracketed welfare reform element conveniently left out of the acronym), ... is now to be potentially extended on a mandatory basis to all welfare recipients in the Northern Territory and elsewhere, even though there is no evidence that the trials have worked.

It is not clear how families are expected to survive without income. What is inexplicable and unconscionable about such draconian possibilities is that they are being proposed by a government concerned about food security and children's wellbeing. But kids, even in remote indigenous Australia, do not live by school attendance alone, they also need food. And families with no income will inevitably become an economic burden for others in their community counter to the aim of other measures such as income management.

In the absence of evidence, it is hard to see SEAM deriving from anything other than ideology and politics. There is no evidence from SEAM pilots that the measure actually improves attendance....

Altman notes that the central justifying logic for extending the scheme turns on the extensive consultation in NT Indigenous communities and the claims that this demonstrated overwhelmingly that this is what communities want.

However Altman notes that there is some sound evidence that counters this.  He is referring to a report by Michele Harris and Rosa McKenna called Cuts to Welfare Payments for School Non-Attendance: Requested or Imposed?,  that is based on an analysis of a diverse set of 10 community meetings where "there was not a single request for welfare cuts or fines to those parents with children who were not attending school". According to this report community concern about education was given a high priority, but what was sought was the re-introduction of bilingual learning, access to full-time education in homelands, support for Aboriginal teachers, acknowledging culture in the curriculum and the need to distribute funds more equitably.

Altman suggests that a more useful focus for policy attention would be the role of the NT Government and its responsibility to ensure that school infrastructure is of sufficient physical quality and that remote teachers are sufficiently skilled to attract students with quality, locally relevant, engrossing, perhaps bi-lingual, education that would make staying away from school an unattractive option.

A decent education is unquestionably important for jobs, confidence and political empowerment. But for the bicultural ways of remote living Aboriginal people it needs to be tailored for success in two worlds, not just an imposed one based on mainstream aspirations.

Read More http://www.crikey.com.au/?p=262884#comments

To read the article referred to above about the consultation process go to

http://www.concernedaustralians.com.au/media/Welfare-Cuts-Requested-or-Imposed.pdfThe

On the same day as Macklin's new bill was announced FAHCSIA released the NTER evaluation (The Northern Territory Emergency Response Evaluation Report 2011, FAHCSIA, 23 November 2011)

This is the second review of the NT Emergency Response.  It brings together a large number of evaluations of specific aspects of the program - including one on education.

ACER carried out the specific review of the education components of the NTER.  They note that Indigenous children in the Northern Territory have much higher rates of vulnerability than non- Indigenous children, as measured by the Australian Early Development Index. Fifty-nine per cent of children in the NTER communities were developmentally vulnerable in two or more domains in 2010, compared with 23 per cent of children in the Northern Territory overall in 2009.

They also note that, at the same time as the NTER was rolling out, the Northern Territory Government was already changing its policies, curriculums and investment in education. It is not possible to separate the contribution of the NTER measures from the changes occurring across the Northern Territory education system as a whole.

Specific observations include:

• Students at schools in remote communities often have English as a second language, a higher than normal incidence of hearing impairment and come from families that have fewer years of formal education.

Editor's note:  Describing students language challenges just in terms of having English as a second language does not provide an accurate picture of the challenges facing students and their English language speaking teachers.  For most students in NTER communities, English language is rarely heard outside of the formal classroom and many adults in the community - including many parents of schools age children cannot speak or read in English with proficiency.

• Due to poor housing and conditions, and the limited availability of local qualified people, teachers recruited to teach in these schools are often young and inexperienced. They rarely stay for long periods.

Specific findings

• Educational attainment remains a key challenge. Average school attendance rates were low and have not improved since the start of the NTER.
• There has been some improvement in National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results for Year 3 reading in NTER schools since 2008, but most children in NTER schools do not meet national minimum standards for reading, writing and numeracy.
• Looking forward, new measures to improve enrolment and attendance at school and the extent and sustainability of the economic base are needed if the NTER is to fulfil its objectives. Education and jobs are critical to the wellbeing of communities.
• The School Nutrition Program (SNP) has not increased attendance, but may have improved student behaviour and parental engagement with the school
• Additional early childhood programs have had moderate take-up and reasonable support from parents.
• 192 additional teaching positions were funded under the NTER.

It is worth noting that the agreement by the Commonwealth to fund up to 200 additional teachers and to build new classrooms was on the basis of the NT agreement to fund schools based on agreed students numbers and not attendance.  My most recent queries of the NT (in early 2011) confirmed that schools are still funded on enrolment adjusted by attendance.

• The teacher housing shortage in NTER communities was reduced from about 90-100 houses at the start of the NTER to 26 dwellings by the end of 2010 as a result of Australian and Northern Territory government funding.
• It is too early to tell whether teacher turnover has been reduced as a result of these measures.
• At the start of the NTER, average student attendance exceeded the available classrooms in at least 10 schools. Facilities were often overcrowded, were inadequately maintained and had poor temperature control. The NTER invested an additional $10.3 million to construct 20 new classrooms, in addition to the $97 million invested under Building the Education Revolution for classrooms in these communities.
• The School Nutrition Program provides breakfast and lunch to students, paid for by the parents and provided by the school. It was established in 68 schools servicing the 73 NTER communities by July 2008 and was primarily intended to increase student attendance. There has not been an increase in attendance. However, secondary goals of the program, such as better student attentiveness and greater community and parental engagement with the school, are being achieved to some degree and the program has a reasonable level of support within NTER communities. A DEEWR survey of parents, providers and school principals found that over 80 per cent of respondents thought the program had a positive impact on student behaviour.
• More than 160 Indigenous people are employed in the School Nutrition Program across the communities.
• In relation to early childhood services , communities generally rely on non-mainstream services funded under the Australian Government's Budget Based Funded services, which are a component of the broader Child Care Services Support Program.
• Under the NTER, the government provided funding to construct and operate nine new crèches and to upgrade the facilities of 13 existing Budget Based Funded crèches, all of which has occurred.
• Playgroups and preschool services were not sustained in seven of the 15 communities where they had been established. These early education services require continuing inputs of professional supervision and support. There is concern that they will fail if responsibility is placed upon community members without suitable support due to the limited training of participants, weak local agency support and competition with other demands.
• There is an inherent difficulty in retaining teachers and maintaining facilities in remote and very remote areas. The cost of providing educational opportunities that match the demonstrated need of children in these areas will continue to be high.
• There is a long-term shortage of Indigenous teachers. One-third of residents, but only 3 per cent of teachers, are Indigenous. Of the 150 principals in Northern Territory schools, only four are Indigenous.

Overarching observations of the general review report are also of interest particularly the following

• There was a significant degree of under servicing across NT communities before the NTER - The NTER delivered much needed additional government services, such as police, teachers, night patrols and classrooms. Communities generally welcomed these additional government services despite short consultation periods.

• For initiatives specific to the NTER communities-such as income management and signage outside communities referring to the alcohol and pornography bans-the abrupt, imposition broke trust and made some people feel that they had been unfairly labeled

• The additional services go some way towards redressing the historical under-servicing of these communities; however, issues remain in housing, infrastructure (including roads), safety and employment opportunities.

• Perhaps the clearest lesson from the NTER is the high level of unmet need within the NTER communities:

The key indicators of a very high level of unmet service need include

• nearly all children in remote areas presented for a health check and hospitalisations doubled for Indigenous children for some conditions following the child health checks
• the appreciation of communities that received a resident police presence for the first time together with the growth in police activities
• the amount of urgent work to repair housing and the still high occupancy rate for houses
• the need for additional interpreters, and
• the high level of activity by night patrols

The Report noted that 'the Northern Territory Emergency Response has seen a proliferation of discrete, short-term funded initiatives, often overlapping in aim and purpose and not integrated with existing universal and targeted services.'

The standout gap evident in this evaluation is in measures to improve school enrolment and attendance. School attendance was very poor at the start of the NTER and has not improved.

The NTER included only one measure to increase attendance-the School Nutrition Program-and it did not achieve that goal. Effective measures specifically targeting enrolment and attendance are needed.

Read More: http://www.facs.gov.au/sa/indigenous/pubs/nter_reports/Documents/nter_evaluation_report_2011.PDF

This evaluation has also been criticized by Michelle Harris  from the Concerned Australians Group.  Her remarks on education make particularly interesting reading:

What continues to be most disturbing is the information that is not provided in the Evaluation and this applies most especially to the section on Enhancing Education. In my reading of this section there is no analysis of the changes that have taken place as a result of disallowing the bilingual learning programme in schools. In the recent consultations this was the most repeated request from communities - the reinstatement of the bilingual programme as it had been previously operating in nine schools. Interestingly the request has come not only from these nine particular communities, but from many other communities as though the demotion of Aboriginal languages is personally insulting to all Aboriginal people.

Comment made that the attendance rates were particularly low during 2010 appears to be attributed to the long and particularly difficult wet season. There is no indication in the report that this may be the result of the imposed 4-hour English programme, as has been suggested by many teachers and community members. By ignoring this issue, there is a sense of total disregard for the rights of Aboriginal communities in regard to the education of their children, a right that is enshrined in international law, in conventions to which Australia is a signatory.

 While the report examines in great detail the NAPLAN results in Northern Territory schools, as well as its impact on enrolment, the report includes the following statement:

Nevertheless, with relatively small numbers of students involved (around 600 in Year 3 and fewer in other year levels), NAPLAN results may vary with no explanation other than 'volatility'. Combined with relatively low participation rates and only three years of data, the discussion of 'trends' is tentative at best. Data are required for subsequent years before more substantive conclusions about changes in NAPLAN results can be made.

 That recognition is very important since all NAPLAN tests are conducted in the English language and are not culturally sensitive. It is the case that children who are participating in a second or third language will be seriously disadvantaged. Why then is there so little flexibility?

 Other barriers that threaten the stability of Northern Territory education are the serious problems of attracting teachers to communities, and then offering them opportunities that encourage longer-term commitments.

 To read the Michelle Harris article go to http://www.concernedaustralians.com.au/media/NTER-Evaluation-Opinion-201...

For more information on what's in the Stronger Future legislation go to http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2011B00242

To read the second reading Speech on this Bill go to http://www.jennymacklin.fahcsia.gov.au/speeches/2011/Pages/jm_s_strongerfutures_23november2011.aspx