What will it take to close the gap in the Northern Territory?

The Northern Territory (NT) is the only Australian state or territory not to meet the early childhood education benchmark in the 2018 Closing the Gap report. Despite the overall early childhood education target being on track, the fact that the jurisdiction with the highest population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is falling behind is of serious concern.

Journalist Sara El Sayed explores the issue.

A commitment to early childhood education is a must in order to support the development of children.

This need is twofold for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, who are twice as likely to be developmentally vulnerable than non Indigenous children.

With the Northern Territory presenting as an outlier in the Closing the Gap report’s progression of early childhood education targets, understanding the distinct issues facing the Indigenous community in the NT is crucial.

Enrolment rates and attendance

The Closing the Gap report shows a clear difference between the number of children enrolled in early childhood education and the number of children actually attending.

The Northern Territory was the only jurisdiction to experience a negative change in enrolment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

Recorded rates of Indigenous children attending 15 or more hours of kindergarten per week in the Northern Territory are the lowest in the country (29%), despite showing the greatest improvement (41%) in the one week reference period of data collection. The report acknowledges there is minimal available data on attendance rates in early childhood education.

Identified issues

The Early Childhood Australia NT Inclusion Support Agency has highlighted a number of issues that have arisen throughout its work in early childhood education and care, including:

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children not always being given opportunities for education and care due to remoteness

• families having competing priorities and associated complexities

• professional development for educators not always being available or consistent

• the transient nature of work in the Territory and subsequent unavailability of a work-ready and skilled workforce

• service delivery difficulties, and

• inflexibility and complexity of funding agreements.

The Agency noted that in order to address these issues, more work needs to be done in terms of:

• developing culturally competent service delivery

• improving workforce capability, and

• cultivating networks, relationships and collaborations with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community.

IEUA-QNT Research Officer Adele Schmidt said the only way this can be effectively achieved is if education authorities listen to the needs of the community by allowing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a voice at the decision making table.

“Research consistently shows, in Australia as well as on a global scale, that what makes a difference is working with Indigenous communities to understand and meet their educational needs and aspirations.

“Collaboration is key,” Schmidt said.

Is there support through funding?

The capacity of early childhood educators to address these issues is limited by resourcing and the support they receive through funding.

Supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children has been a key focus area of the National Partnership Agreement, from which Universal Access funding was introduced.

Universal Access funding has made a great deal of difference to the enrolment and engagement of young Australians in early childhood education, as the resourcing it provides has proven to be integral to assisting staff to provide quality education.

However, for the past six years Universal Access funding has been piecemeal – with teachers and kindergarten staff across Australia held in a climate of uncertainty from year to year, wondering whether or not their centres will receive funding.

The benefits of additional funding have been made evident, and the complexity of the issues facing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community – particularly in the Territory – are also evident.

There is now a desperate and fundamental need to secure the permanency of this funding in order for those working in the sector to appropriately plan their approaches to addressing these issues.

The ongoing uncertainty of this funding arrangement does not allow for this planning, nor does it provide educators with the foresight needed to address such multifaceted issues.

Past programs to address the needs of early learners in the Northern Territory, such as the Let’s Start Exploring Together Preschool Program, have shown that an informed approach to resourcing and management is crucial.

The Let’s Start Exploring Together Preschool Program was a trial to implement the Exploring Together Preschool Program (ETPP) in the Northern Territory for Indigenous and non Indigenous parents and children. ETPP was an education program designed for children aged 3-7 years experiencing behavioural difficulties.

The final evaluation report of the Let’s Start Exploring Together Preschool Program demonstrated that community based organisations and agencies did not have the professional resources to deliver targeted early intervention programs to high professional standards consistently over time. This lack of resources is not unfamiliar to those working in the sector.

Families as First Teachers

While resourcing continues to be an issue, some steps are being taken in the right direction to address the early learning needs of Indigenous children.

Families as First Teachers (FaFT) is an evidence based early childhood program that aims to improve education, health and wellbeing for Indigenous children from birth to the year before school.

The program is part of the Foundations element of the Indigenous Education Strategy, which by the end of 2017 aimed to:

• Expand the delivery of FaFT into remote communities from 21 remote Indigenous communities to 32 communities by the end of 2017. Ensure early literacy and child development approaches were evidence-based.

• Use the Abecedarian Approach Australia to improve preschool children’s language and literacy skills and support their overall development to enable success at school.

• Integrate early childhood services and programs in child and family centre sites.

• Invest in placing managers in each Child and Family Centre (CFC) to coordinate services across health, education and family support in centres located at Gunbalanya, Maningrida, Ngukurr, Palmerston and Yuendumu, and

• Ensure all schools are provided with a structured timeline of events and activities that prepared children and their parents for the changes stemming from Families as First Teachers to preschool and frompreschool to year one.

According to the December 2017 Lifting Our Game report, the FaFT program achieved operation in 32 sites in 2016-17, primarily in remote Indigenous communities, with 1,887 children and 1,792 parents and carers participating in the program for an average of one day a week.

The report noted that a survey of 530 participating parents found that 495 knew more about how to help and support their children to learn and develop as a result of attending FaFT.

Respondents also believed that the early learning activities the FaFT program delivered helped their children to be ready for school.

The program also serves as an employment pathway – with eight parents in one community having graduated from the FaFT program now employed in early learning programs.

A draft Indigenous Education Strategy implementation plan for the period of 2018-2020 has been developed.

For more information and resources visit education.nt.gov.au/education/support-for-teachers/faft