Miss Gabrielle...way outback

I got a letter this morning, and one section sums up what this week has been like for me. “Life keeps reminding us that it consists of both good and bad, but up there it is completely undeniable. Must of us cluster on the coast trying to make our lives all good, and therefore living in fear of the bad.”

Life up here is as wild as the land we all live on. We may be able to influence it but we can never control it. On Sunday night my chest began to feel like someone had placed a rock on my sternum. It was how I felt when I had pneumonia only a couple of months ago but I didn’t have a fever so I had some vitamins and had an early night.

On Monday my voice was croaky and I had begun to cough. The children asked me ‘miss, why do you have a rusty voice?’ When I woke up on Tuesday I had no voice at all, but with no sick leave and absolutely no one who could take my class I went in to school again. The day was a game with the children to see if they could interpret my sign language. They did a magnificent job. They read the big book by themselves. I had to act out words they didn’t know and they were overjoyed when they could guess them correctly. The one boy in the class who can read interpreted instructions written on the board ‘go and open your red books’ etc. Instead of asking me how to spell words they began asking each other. They worked together and supported each other. I was excited to see the shift from the beginning of the year where they fought with each other and called each other dumb if they didn’t know something.

The assistant teacher told me a fable about this. She said ‘a fisherman goes out to fish for crabs. There are white fella crabs and Aboriginal crabs. He caught a bucket of each but fell asleep in his boat. The white fella crabs crawled on top of each other and all of them crawled out of the buckets and to freedom. But every time an Aboriginal crab began to crawl out, the other crabs would pull him back into the bucket.’

My children were so beautifully behaved and I was proud of them. Just before lunch time one girl came up to me with her work. She pointed to each part, then to the blank part at the bottom and shrugged her shoulders. I pointed to the blank part and motioned for her to draw. She repeated my motion of drawing and then shrugged her shoulders again. I pointed to all her work and then motioned again to draw it all. Then she understood, smiled and gave me the thumbs up. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t deaf, I just had no voice but of corse I was unable. By lunch time, most of the children were signing to me rather than speaking. My room has never been so quiet.

I dragged myself to the staff meeting after school and went straight home to bed. By Wednesday I was feeling quite unwell and the novelty of another silent day had worn off for me and the children. I was grumpy and they responded accordingly, and became more difficult. One of the assistant teachers came and did art with my students. She made a giant paper mache turtle and seeing that I was sick she reached into her bag and pulled out some goo which she rubbed on my neck. I was a little alarmed at first but then I felt a heat radiate into my neck. She told me to put some on my chest and it felt like someone had poured warm scented water into my chest cavity. She told me shyly that it was bush medicine. Then she whispered ‘I don’t trust those white man tablets, not natural’. I was inclined to agree. She told me that she would come around to my house that night with a barrel of boiling bush medicine that I could put in the bath and bathe in.

By that night I had become feverish and was feeling very unwell. I decided to go to the clinic in the morning. I was sleeping on the couch when there was a knock at the door. I struggled to my feet, and opened it, ready to see this lovely large Aboriginal woman. When I opened the door there was a little, white, blond girl. My brain, slow on the uptake said ‘hi, come in’. Then I realized it was Christine Jauncy…one of my favourite people in the world. She is generous, fun, talented, big-hearted, and happy, all rolled up in a massive bundle of coolness. For a moment I threw off the blanket of fever and unwellness and leapt into her arms. We both jumped up and down for a while until I was overcome with a fit of coughing and had to sit down. She had driven all the way from Sydney, and had Borroloola as a stop just for me. She came with her flatmate and her 2 lovely children.

Amanda had been at the pub watching the State of Origin and had told one of the nurses that I was not well. Concerned, the nurse came to check my chest after the game. She diagnosed mild pneumonia and went to the clinic to get me some antibiotics and other medicines and instructed me severely to take the following day off work, not only for my sake but for the children which was fair enough. I took the following day off work and slept all day, leaving Christine to explore the huge metropolis that is Borroloola.

I got up from my sleep and went into work to finish my reports which were due the next day. I had been organised and thought I just had to check what I had done, only to discover to my great distress that I had not even begun the reports and had been working on something completely different. I had hours of work ahead of me, by best friend waiting at home for me, and lungs that had decided to conduct their own mutiny. Nearing tears I sat for a few hours on a tiny blue kindy chair, with parts of my buttock hanging off one side as I typed in information, cursing the day I decided to become a teacher.

I went home, climbed into my purple onesie that mum sent me, and trudged across the road to Ryans house to sleep as Christine and the kids were bunking down in my room.

On Friday I was beginning to feel a little better, and went to the sports carnival. I finished my reports, noting with each hour with tentative excitement that I was beginning to feel better. My voice began to return. I finished my reports and high fived the kids as they ran and jumped and threw their way through the day. Christine, Katch and the kids even sat on the oval with their red Barra shirts on. Perhaps a little different to what they had planned. I sent them off to Carranbarrini, a national park with amazing rock formations, and I stole more health back as I slept all afternoon. We went to the pub for dinner that night and I watched the teachers leave for the long weekend. I had long resigned myself to a lonely long weekend, but as Saturday dawned, I felt almost normal, and we all jumped in the car and went on a road trip.

We drove all day, the 5 of us, a car and a trailer. I had dreaded the thought of travelling 600km with a 5 and an 8 year old but they were brilliant. They were so quiet I had to keep checking that they were there. We got to the Barunga festival and went in search of the school bus with the teachers from school in it. When we got through the gates and saw how huge the place was we gave up and found a tree to camp under. Just as we finished setting up camp, and the sun had set, I realized that the bus we camped next to was the Borroloola school bus. We made an appatising meal of rice and potatos and then headed to the main stage. I didn’t stay for long before getting tired and wandering back to the camp site. Christine and I sat and chatted under the moonlight, with the slight smell of gas as the burner illuminated pale gum tree, with its sqiggly veins.

Once I stopped coughing, I slept well, cosy and warm in my purple onesie. We slept under a mosquito net, staring up into the stars and the full moon casting its silver shadow onto the camp.

We had breakfast, and after a foiled attempt to kidnap Christine and stuff her into the car, we left them there, waving sadly as we pulled out. She had come for a few days with 3 people I didn’t know, and they slotted into life like they had always been here. I missed them before they were even out of view.

I jumped into the nurses car with Amanda and we went into Katherine to get supplies. I bought 2 pairs of jeans, a belt and spent ridiculous amounts of money on food at Woolworths. I even treated myself to a current Sydney Morning Herald, which set me back $6. We headed back to Borroloola, stopping for a quick swim in the thermal pools at Mataranka before tackeling the 550km back to ‘the Loo’. 

And so this week has been…where life happens, where good and bad are so entwined that they are merely present, neither exists without the other, so neither should be singled out and sought. I felt so unwell but there were flickers of life, love and humanity that would otherwise have remained hidden. My children worked together to learn, a quiet Aboriginal woman opened her culture to me in a touch and the millennia of knowledge in her bush medicine, a nurse who was willing to come over in the middle of the night to listen to my chest, Christine who made soup, and Katch who beat mucus from my lungs. I will not seek good, nor bad, rather I will accept that they are twins in the womb of life.

We are making a giant turtle today in class and I asked the kids what they wanted to name it. We got the usual 'Rodger, Mavis, Abraham' and then one of the child said something that sounded like 'goodangi'. It was clearly an aboriginal word and I thought it was a great idea for the name for the turtle. When i said 'brilliant, sounds good', the assistant teacher gave me a concerned look. She asked me if i knew the meaning of the word. I said I didnt. She whispered to me that it means 'slut'. The kids unanomously decided to call our class turtle 'slut'. So of course I had to veto the name. He is now called Rodger.

We have to report on certain aspects of the curriculum. I hadnt been given these areas until after I had done all my programing so I had a few issues trying to assess my kids on it. I had to come up with some activities to teach and test them in a short amount of time.

One of the areas was the natural environment. Students had to work out if something was man made or natural. Now i didnt think this would be much of an issue but there was very little understanding.

'Miss, is the oval man made?'

Was it always there?

Yes

So it is natural

So the goal posts are natural too?

No, they werent always there

Yes they were.

Hmmm...

So this went on for about 30 mins. I took them outside and they had to catogorise everything they saw. Many of them were very muddled until on of the children said:

'So miss...when you say its natural, does that mean that Jesus made it?'

'Yes, you could say that'.

The girl then went and told everyone...'Its Jesus made or Man made'. There was a collective sigh of 'oh...why didnt you just say that?''

They had no issues after that.

Before I took the job to teach here I told my boss that I had to return to Sydney in week four for my brothers wedding. Everything was agreed upon. Flights were booked and all was good. Until the universe decided to conspire.

There is a mine which is an hour out of Borroloola and we use the mine flights to get back to Darwin but two weeks before the wedding the mine closed and flights were to be cut back, and possibly stop running completely. We called up almost every day to check if there were flights but they could not guarantee us a spot.

A week before the wedding, not only had the mine shut but the rains began to flood the area. I was due to fly out on a Tuesday morning flight and on Thursday night, the mine was still not confirming flights, and the road to the mine was underwater. With flood waters surrounding Borroloola on all sides there was no vehicle access in or out, not that I had a car anyway. I was beginning to panic. I felt like it was my last chance to get out of the middle of nowhere and if I didn’t get on a flight I may never be seen again.

So I called my ever trusty father. I had heard that there was a charter flight bringing  teachers into the tiny Borroloola airstrip on the Saturday morning and I wanted to get on that plane. My fear of flying shrunk into non-existence compared to my fear of being stranded in Borroloola.

Dad said he would make some enquiries on the Friday which of course gave us less than 24 hours. While I was teaching, Dad was bouncing around on the phone between several departments within the DET. At 1pm my class was interrupted by a very angry principal. My father had secured my escape from Borroloola, and the DET had called my principal to confirm my leave. Dad was waiting for the department to confirm, before calling me. I waiting for my dad to confirm it was a possibility before approaching the principal and the department wanted to confirm with the principal before confirming with my dad. I was not particularly popular that day but I had my ticket out and I didn’t know if I was going to return.

As I left school that day I heard that the flooding had worsened and that the road through Borroloola was unpassable. The road that separated Borroloola heights, where I live, with the airport. 

I went down to see how badly flooded it was. Rose was down there, bare footed, and with no shirt. She looked at the rest of the children playing in the water and came and stood so close to me that her skin was always touching some part of me. She didn’t speak and didn’t look at me, just came close. Then, I reached my hand down and took her soft little hand in mine. She looked at me in the eyes for the first time and smiled. We walked together silently towards the water. As we neared the edge I dropped her hand folded my skirt in my hand and waded in with her, praying that I had no open sores and that the crocodiles were floating elsewhere.

When we got as far as I was willing to venture, I let go of her and told her to go and swim with her friends. After some hesitation she did. She dived under the water and the insects that had been nestled into her matted hair floated away.

090

I decided that even if the water failed to recede, I would still be safe to cross the next day. I would just have to carry my pack on my head, take some spare dry clothes and brave Mr Bombastic.

As I was finishing my packing and getting ready for bed, another storm broke. It rained heavily for 2 hours before I decided that there was no way I could cross the road the next day. Amanda and I went to Annas house, and then we also gathered Sheree. At 10pm, I put a red poncho over my pj’s and we went in search of a boat and a driver who would be willing to get up at dawn and get me across the river. We found Shelly, a chef from NZ who used to be part of the silverferns NZ netball team. As her home made spa bubbled away, she put a beer in our hands and listened to our story. Then she made some phone calls and within minutes had found a boat, a driver, and a 4WD to drive me down to the boat ramp. The only proviso was that I had to bring back a bottle of rum for both of them.

Although my flight was at 9am I was desperately paranoid about missing it so I arranged to be picked up at 7am.

The car was waiting for me as the day dawned, a day that was much too sanguine considering the foul mood of the weather the previous night. We drove towards the boat ramp but decided, since we had time, to look at the water level. When we drove up the water was just licking the edges of the bridge. We drove straight over, our tires were barely dampened.

I cursed and thanked the heavens at the same time, not sure if I liked the bipolar nature of it all, even when it did go my way.

When I got to the airport I found the pilot already getting the plane ready. I waited in the terminal which is a picnic table under a 2 sided concrete block.

Despite being told that the flight was at 9 the pilot had decided to leave at 7.30am so it was the one time that being anal about getting to the airport early paid off.

But then he lost his fuel cards and could not put fuel in the plane. He walked back to his trailer in the local guest house in search of these cards while I lay on top of the picnic table with my head resting on my bag.

Finally the plane was ready to go. He asked me if I had been in one of these planes before to which I answered ‘not really’. Then he took me around to the side of the plane to show me the emergency procedures. He opened a hatch and pointed to a yellow pack.

‘In there’ he said, ‘is some food, water and flares for if we crash and I die’.  I am not a fan of flying normally, having spent $1000 on a Qantas fearless flying course…but I was so desperate to leave that the threat of death, or surviving in the wilderness with only flares and crackers didn’t phase me in the slightest.

Borroloola was on the ABC news a few months back because the children had been tormenting a large salt water crocodile that inhabits the river. The children are convinced that the crocodiles can’t see their black bodies in the water so they won’t get taken when they swim in there.

The first croc they took as a pet was called snowy. He was a large albino croc and was easy to spot in the water. He became so famous that he was relocated to a croc park in Darwin much to the disappointment of the children and some locals. There have been many kidnapping plans hatched but stealing a large albino crocodile is not the simplest thing to undertake

Another croc grew and took his place. His name is Mr Bombastic and the children treat him like they do many pets. They stole some chickens from a farm and threw them live to the 17 foot croc. When they got tired of this, they found some of the camp dogs, and tied them to trees and watched while Mr Bombastic swivelled out of the water, took the dogs in one bite and slunk back into the murkiness. But as children do, they took it one step further and some of the older children convinced some of the younger ones to swing on branches above him so they could watch him erupt from the water with his teeth champing.

A lot of parents say that they love all their children, but they just hold different rooms in their hearts. I think it is the same as teaching. Every child in my class affects me. If they are sick, I worry about them. If they are sad, I feel it too. If they are happy, my own happiness is magnified. But it can be hard out here, where I am so aware of the living conditions, the social situation, the statistics.

Rose is one child that I have been particularly concerned about. She is withdrawn in class, doesn’t play with the other students and it took weeks before I heard her unsure voice. I often caught her watching every movement I made around the classroom, but she looked away before I could make eye contact. I often wake at night with ideas about how I could build trust enough for her to interact.

I went in before the first day of school and moved 18 tables and chairs into my class. I had been told that for the first week I could expect around 5 students. I wanted my classroom to have a community feeling to it so I put the tables in a U shape. This was so that they could all see, but they could not talk to each other. When 25 turned up my U became more like a cresent moon with a milky way of stars shooting off in all directions as I frantically searched for more chairs. Because of the flooding that had cut off the town, and an ordering bungle, there wasn’t enough furnature in the school so students had to share chairs, and write in the same books, bumping each others elbows as they did so.

For the first three weeks the students would jump over tables, climb under them, hide in corners or run out the door. Trying to get them to sit in their seats for a lesson was impossible and I held no hope of changing this any time soon.

I tried giving them all a chart with their names on it and if they behaved they got a sticker. If they got 5 stickers they got a prize. It worked for 2 hours. By the end of it they had stolen each others stickers, taken their own stickers off to stick to their eye lids, or they had discovered my stash of stickers and gone around adding stickers to every chart.

So I tried something new. I made my milky way into ordered rows. I printed and laminted name cards and stuck them to tables and students had to sit where their name was. This was to separate trouble students and get some continuity in the class. It worked until recess, where they scraped their name tags off and placed them where they wanted to sit.

I tried points for the rows that were behaving the best, and not removing their labels. This worked for a whole day, but when the next day dawned, the half of the class that had been absent the day before came to school, and had no where to sit, and the half that had been there didn’t come so they ended up sitting anywhere they wanted. I persevered for a week and had little success.

Then I tried another method. If they got out of their seat for any reason without asking, they got a cross by their name. If they got 3 crosses they would have to stay in at recess. For the first 3 days, most of the class missed part of their recess. Then the numbers staying in began to dwindle, and eventually there were only a couple.

Then one morning, after all my fiddling with seating and stressing about behaviour management the fever broke. They sat down, they listened and they did a little bit of work. I let all of them out on time for their recess and I walked out to do lunch duty. There were tears in the corner of my eyes as I made my way into the play ground and Bec came up and asked if I was ok. I stumbled for words. ‘They sat’ I managed to stutter. I didn’t know what to do with myself. All I could think was that if they manage to learn how to sit, imagine how much they could learn.

And that was how things began to change. 

I was reading a book with one of my more difficult children. It was book about a teacher who was leaving the school and the gifts that children brought her. One child brought a fish, another brought some weaving and one brought a bush turkey.

The boy I was reading to said ‘Miss, I love bush turkey’.

‘I do too’, I replied.

Then he asked ‘does your wife catch it for you?’

Now there are several issues here. Firstly I have never eaten bush turkey, just the cranberry sauce turkey that comes pre-sliced at Coles. Secondly…I don’t have a wife and having to explain why would have been quite complex so we just kept reading.

The students often call me Mister rather than Miss. It could just be gender confusion, not helped by my short hair, but its often when they are in trouble. Im yet to work it out.

Days pass, one much the same to another. Each with little breakthroughs, and setbacks. I would wake at 5.30 and make sure I was prepared for the day. After a breakfast of vegemite toast I would head off to school at 7am. There, I would make sure everything was ready to go. Children begin to arrive at 7.45, and school begins with the shrill blowing of a whistle and bare feet stampeding into lines. Our lines overlook a rubbish strewn oval in front, the main road to the left and the wilderness to the right. Children fuss and fidget while they wait to say good morning. Its usually Julie who cuts the ribbon on the new day by saying Good morning children, to which they yell in unison Good monrning Miss Julie. Then Julie will look at the teachers and the children scream as loud as they can ‘Good morning teachers’, then they giggle and we smile as we say a pathetic, unified good morning back as we do a mental role call and calculate how difficult the day is going to be.

We take the role and then the lunch orders – I still have to hide the fact that I get some of them muddled or I don’t know some of their names. I ask for their last name or get them to help me pick their name from the 40 that are on my list.

We take the class down to do daily fitness – and try to come up with games they enjoy playing. Some reluctantly stumble around like sleep still has his hands firmly clasped around their ankles but most run, like brumbies, their skinny legs and bare feet effortlessly run, change direction and run again. The sound of laughter is more potent than my morning coffee and as I look over the tree studded hills with the sun kissing its forehead, I feel homesick for something but I can never figure out exactly what. When the children have snot running from their noses onto their lips or when they climb the goal posts out of teacher reach, or when they begin to do a mass ‘wander’ its time to go inside. They get drinks then file into the classroom where they fight to be the ones to hand out tissues or carry the rubbish bin. The children blow their noses until there is nothing left, which often takes several tissues. Then we sit down to start the day.

For the first few weeks I struggled to think of activities every day to fill in the time. I would have to stretch things out, read ridiculously slowly, or read several books, asking questions and pointing out pictures. After three weeks of this I was given the training on the program I should have been using and the structure made a huge difference.

We have 20 minutes for recess, which is just enough time to make sure the children have food, run to the toilet and make another cup of coffee. I didn’t get a recess or lunch break for the first 4 weeks of school. I was either on duty, had children staying in for misbehaviour or I was preparing for the next session. There were many times through those first weeks when I would turn to the teachers aid desperately and say that they had done everything I had planned for the day. She would always shrug and I would think of something, thankful that children were too preoccupied to see my panic.

I spent weekends making educational games after that so they would have something to do when they had finished that wasn’t entirely mindless.

After the day has finished and the last foot has scampered home, when the noise escapes with the children down the street I sit. I usually sit for 20 minutes. No thoughts dare to knock on the door of my mind. My eyes fail to see the pencils left on the lino floor or eraser shavings on the tables. For those minutes I am unconscious with my eyes open. Like a parent that has finally got their children to sleep and closed all the doors I steal those precious moments and let peace be absorbed into my skin.

Then, if its Monday I go to get the mail before heading back to school to plan for the next day. If its Tuesday I go to the staff meeting. If its Wednesday Amanda and I go to the store, since the fresh food comes in on Wednesday. On Thursday we have staff training and on Friday I go back to the post office and post things.

We tended to leave school 11 hours after we arrived, at around 6pm. Sometimes later. We came home, whipped up some quick dinner, and settled into a night of more work. I worked until my eyelids had to be propped up with forks...then i would succumb. I would go to bed, knowing there was infinitely more work to do. I would dream about the work, often waking up in the night to write down thoughts or ideas...and before i knew it...the alarm would go off again at 5.30am 

The failure of policy is the result of insisting that illiteracy and non-numeracy reflect an ethnic gap between indigenous and non-indigenous students.

The National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy tests of children in school years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in 2008 proved there was no such gap, but showed a chasm between the literacy and numeracy of children attending remote indigenous schools and all other Australian children.

In Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT where there are no remote schools, indigenous children's results are the same as for non-indigenous children. About 10 per cent of all children did not sit tests or failed them.

But for indigenous students in remote NSW schools, failure rates were 25 per cent; in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland they were 50 per cent; and in the Northern Territory they were 75 per cent. When the number of children not sitting tests are added to those failing in the NT, almost 100 per cent of children in remote indigenous schools fail all numeracy and literacy tests.

NAPLAN results show that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who attend mainstream schools in Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT have mainstream achievement levels. While a handful of exceptional remote schools work to mainstream standards, non-performing remote schools deprive their students of the life skills that every Australian needs.

Low achievement is not a problem of indigenous children but of non-performing remote schools. Low achievement is not because of non-performing remote schools, it is due to the myriad of challenges that face the remote school.

For many indigenous children standard Australian English is not their first language and they are not exposed to standard Australian English at any place other than school.

Overcrowding in houses means that children don't get the quantity or quality of sleep that they require, and constant disruptions in the home environment mean that children lack routine and struggle with the routine of coming to school.

Violence at home spills over into classroom, and a lot of teaching time is lost to behaviour management.

Children are often sick with illnesses rarely seen in cities such as boils, scabies, malnutrition and other infections. They miss school and are sometimes permanently impaired because of these illnesses. In my classroom 87% of my students have hearing loss due to poorly treated ear infections. They also miss large amounts of school if caregivers are sick, for funerals, and due to wet season flooding. 

Many children come to school without food.

Teachers are over worked in a system that clearly does not function, and our recommendations regarding change in the system are not listened to, which is one factor in  the high rates of staff turnover.

Separate, substandard curriculums and limited teaching capacities are a characteristic of non-performing remote schools. Dumbed-down curriculums do not develop literacy and maths skills by building on successive blocks of knowledge.Children rarely attend school for sucessive blocks of time so building on blocks of knowledge is impossible.

I find the assumption that part reason that Indigenous students are underachieving is the limited capacity of the teacher. I have never seen a group of such committed teachers as the ones I currently work with. They arrive at school at 7.30 and most dont leave before 4.30 and we are back at school on the weekends. We constantly think, hope, dispair. We sit together discussing how we can put this great jigsaw of mismatching pieces together to form an education. We have travelled state lines to be here on the front lines of education in Australia to find that we dont get back up, we get gunned down. We are gunned down by simplistic answers put forward by smooth talking politions and journalists who have not spent any time in these remote schools.

Many children are not learning English in early school years, although worldwide research indicates that young children learn languages more easily than older children. Many bilingual programs are thus, in effect, non-lingual, with children not becoming literate in any language. Incentives that reward school attendance have a role to play, but truancy is a matter of law and attendance must be enforced.

A few exceptional remote schools that follow mainstream curriculums exist. Some dysfunctional parents fail to send their children to school, but many concerned parents are aware that their children are not being educated. The implication is that the majority of parents send their children to school every day. This certainly has not been my experience. It is estimated in my community that only 2/3 of children in the community are enrolled at school and even then there is only a 60% attendence rate. There are 38 children in my class, but on average about 20 attend school, and only 6 of those children would come every day. Parents, the community, the police and the school must work together to change this, as non-attendence is the fundamental reason for failure in school. The school can have exciting programs and attendence charts but if parents do not send their children, how can the school be blamed for their lack of education? This is not to say that the parents are solely to blame, it is infinately more complex than that.

They see that their children are at school only a few hours a day, a few days a week, and that the remote school year is much shorter than that of other schools. This is not true. The remote school year is only one week shorter than that of most states and that is primarily due to the difficulties in acessing some schools in height of the wet season.

Prolonged funerals take children out of school, but so do festivals scheduled in term time. The reinstatement of permits has hidden non-performing schools from most Australians, but not from parents.

Early last year the federal government provided nearly $100 million in additional funding for NT education. Fifty of the 200 funded teachers who were to be added by 2011 were supposed to be in place by September last year. The states and the NT also have increased funding for indigenous education. But there have been no substantive policy changes.

The failures of remote education are systemic. Present government approaches fail because they are not evidence-based. Homeland Learning Centres in the NT clearly indicate that separate is not equal.

Alternatives must be found for smaller groups of children. If they cannot be taught by distance education, like other small groups of Australian children, they will have to be bussed, boarded Monday to Friday or during term time, or their parents must move to larger centres during term time.

Throughout Australia, policy reform must tackle inadequate buildings and equipment, introduce mainstream curriculums and teaching standards, and apply standard administrative rules in 200 non-performing remote schools that are only a very small proportion of Australia's more than 9600 schools. But departments of education must take back the responsibility for running their schools from unqualified staff and community activists to ensure that education priorities are met.

Assistant teachers cannot be left hanging. They can be employed as teachers' aides or enrolled in courses that will give them nationally recognised qualifications.

School choice is essential for raising standards. Where communities chose to establish an independent school, their decision should be supported by education departments. And the federal Government's election promise to publish individual school-by-school results must be implemented so parents are able to evaluate schooling alternatives.

Aboriginal and Torres Islander children in remote communities must not be viewed as different from other Australian children. So long as cultural traits justify the removal of children from mainstream literacy and numeracy, science and humanities classes, remote schools will fail. Other children in Australia for whom English is a second language are given seperate literacy programs to assist learning. The curriculim has not been 'dumbed down' for indigenous students, rather it has been adapted for their zone of development. The students in my school are not considered mainstream. We are considered a 'special school' however, unlike other special schools with a teacher student ratio of 6:1 we have 20:1 and are expected to achieve the same results. 

A three-year timetable is realistic if there is the political will to transform non-performing schools and bring remote indigenous literacy and numeracy to mainstream levels. Non-specific targets and decade-long time frames are no longer acceptable. Australia has the resources and it must find the political will to transform non-performing schools.

There is no doubt that education in remote areas needs to change, and that indigenous Australians are severly disadvantaged in getting an equal education.  The cycles of non-attendence, failure of students and teacher burn-out need to be broken. Class sizes should be kept to a maximum of ten students. A home liaison officer needs to be employed to work with centrelink and the police to ensure enrollment and school attendence. Teachers must be valued and allowed to do their jobs, and appropriate measures should be taken to support them in this endevour. Indigenous assistant teachers should be given the oppotunities to study to become full time class teachers.

All Australian children deserve the same high standards of education.

Finally - to my 38 intelligent, cheeky, bright, smiling children - it is my hope that you will receive an education that will open the world up to you. You have some of the most remarkable history surging through your veins, and some of the most horrific, but it is you who will take yourselves into the future.