NT education system 'a failure'
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A senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies has labelled the Northern Territory's education system a 'failure'.
Helen Hughes has released a paper reinforcing that students from remote schools perform a lot worse in literacy and numeracy than their metropolitan counterparts.
Professor Hughes says by encouraging bilingual education programs in remote schools, the Northern Territory Government has failed to achieve results in any language.
She is calling on the Government to streamline education.
"[The] Northern Territory is an outlier on every single test of numeracy and literacy, years three, five, seven and nine," she said.
"The results are appalling.
"They amount to a 100 percent failure rate."
She said there was an inherent culture in remote schools that children "are different" and do not need to read and write.
"There's hardly any secondary teaching and it's the curriculum that's the problem. Everybody knows it."
However, the Northern Territory branch of the Education Union says bilingual programs in remote schools encourage better school attendance.
"We want the kids to get to school. That is all it boils down too," the union's Rodney Smith said.
"If they get to school they have a chance of learning something and by removing the chance to be comfortable at school and being introduced to school in their own language, is going to stop getting the children there and feeling comfortable."
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